Wine turned to vinegar

[cklages]

So my attempt at making pin cherry wine has failed. I now have a little over half a gallon of what smells an awful lot like balsamic vinegar. I'm not fully sure of what happened (actually I do know that it must be an acetobacter infection, I just don't know how that happened).

My question is though, is it going to be good vinegar? I mean, can I leave it for a few more months and will the vinegar character develop more, to make it more suitable for salad dressing and cooking and whatnot?

The flavour seems good for vinegar, but its still a little weak. I mean, its almost (but not quite) a drinkable wine. It would be better if it was more sour, is there a way to encourage this?

 

[Yooper]

It might turn into a good vinegar- it might not. You could save it and see how it turns out- maybe it'll make good Christmas gifts.

It should get more sour all on it's own, but if not you could always purchase a "mother", or buy some commercial vinegar that has a mother in it.

Sorry about your batch- that's really discouraging!

 

[cklages]

Thank you for your condolences on my lost batch. Luckily my wine experiments are only 1 gallon at a time and I am learning many valuable lessons.

So far I have learned:

1. Rack off the lees early, you can let beer primary for a month, but not wine. Also autolysis smells like a goodyear tire. (one dumped gallon batch)

2. Mixing a starsan sanitized autosiphon with a sulphited wine makes a horrendous odour (one dumped gallon batch)

3. Mead needs nutrients not just energizer (this gallon is getting more time...we'll see)

I will look around for some mother of vinegar, hopefully this turns out. If not there is always next year

 

[malkore]

on #2

I only use star-san and only buy wine kits that use sulphites.

I have not had any odor problems.

Star-san and rubber bungs though...stink.

 

[cklages]

Malkore, that is interesting, perhaps it was something else and I assumed wrong. It really was a nasty, permeating stink. I do use rubber bungs though, and perhaps that was what got into the wine.

Thank goodness I have had great success with beer, or I would be getting a little frustrated!

Now that I think of it, I did have sanitizer strength k-meta in the airlock and that got dumped into the starsan bath when I was sanitizing the siphon, perhaps that was the problem.