what happened??!!

okay---i mashed the grapes, checked the sg and it was 1.060. added the mutrient and the yeast, covered it, stirred it every day for a week and kept it lightly covered at a temp of about 70.

today I pressed the must, put it in 5 gal carboy, checked the sg and it is 1.010 and very tart. what the hell happened and can it be fixed?

can someone out there help me?

thanks
pam

Pam.

What kind of grapes did you use? There is certainly not enough sugar, should have been more around 1.095 or so to start.

Beyond that you are doing the right thing. 1.010 is a great time to press and rack. The wine is still fermenting. The grav will drop to about 0.95 or so. It tastes bad because it is not done. If you make wine from grapes it takes a long time for the taste to develop.

I really need to know what kind of grapes you used. Let me know on this post. So far you do not need to "fix" anything. Patience is what you need. A lot of it. Try 6 months to a year to bottle and depending on the grape sometimes that much again or longer till it tastes ok.

good morning D
thanks for the reply. I am just sick about this. I bought vines from Double A vineyard in upstate New York. I live in the upper peninsula of michigan. Frontenac is the variety and is developed for the cold winters. this is the third season for my vines. when I picked them they seemed sweet. what should I watch for in my carboy? any bubbling? thanks again for your post.
pam

Well you really needed to test a lot of things with that grape variety. For one the brix or SG. You may have picked too soon, it's hard to tell and totally depends on the grape what kind of sugar level you will have. With a starting SG of 1.060 you only have a potential to make about 9% alcohol. If you have gone below 1.010 you could add some sugar, maybe a pound and a half per gallon, but you already racked into a carboy so you can't do that now, and racking back into a primary at this point will just expose it to too much oxygn, so you are stuck with what you are stuck with. 9% will work but drink it fast, it won't last long.

Next time, test for sugar on the vine, taking a grape or two from every plant and averaging it. If they seem to come up short, you could try dropping part of your harvest IE cutting it off and letting it sit on the ground, letting the plant concentrate the sugars and flavors in the remaining grape.

After you harvest, you mash, stir in some pectic enzyme (1/2 tsp per gallon) and about 1/16th tsp of sulfite per gallon and let it sit overnight. The next day, check and adjust your acid levels, this is very important, add some acid blend if necessary to bring it up to around .50-.65% tartaric, then add your sugar to bring the must up to between 1.090 and 1.100. If the acid is too high add water to bring it down to that level then add sugar to bring the sg back up.

What is in your carboy should be bubbling yes, I am assuming you are using an airlock, if not get one for each carboy with a drilled bung. Check the sg again, you may be able to make a sugar syrup if it is still high enough and feed it a bit at a time to bring up the alcohol level. Let me know what your sg is now and the temp of the fermentation area. Make sure the area is 1) a steady temperature with no wide fluctuations of more than maybe 10 degrees. and 2) that the temp is staying between 65 and 75F.

Next time do not tightly cover the must for the primary fermentation, just cover it with a tarp or something and tie it with a string. Initially it needs O2.

Did you remove the stems when you mashed the grapes?

yes I destemmed, I checked the sugar at the beginning of the first firmentation and it was 9.5. I covered it lightly with a tablecloth. I added camden tablets and yeast nutrient.

soooooo-- why can't I pour out a few cups of whatever it is that I have in the carboy add sugar to it and put it back in the carboy. It's no good the way it is, why not give it a shot.

I tasted the grapes just before I picked them and they were quit sweet.

thanks again
pam

Pam how many gallons did you make, how much is actually in the carboy how big is the carboy and how close to the top are you?

A pound of sugar to 3 gallons should raise SG approximately 0.010-0.015, you would add that to about a cup of hot water to make a syrup. It is not a good idea to raise it more than that amount at a time because you risk getting a stuck fermentation. Since we know you started out with around a 1.060 we need to add enough to get you to an imaginary starting SG of 1.095 so we need to know how much you have, do an approximate guess calculation thingie so we can figure out how much to add. You could get a foam over because of the carboy but what the hell you are right it's gotta be done.

You might want to invest in a brix refractometer, it's a tool that you can measure sugar content with just a drop from a grape, you can decide if it is time to pick that way etc. Ebay they are somewhere in the 25 dollar range.

hey doc. d. what about raising the alcohol after the fact .. would not need much or a high proof clear something to raise it a few % and since she has to wait for the wine to mature anyways the high proof would blend well by then ? no ?

Tony-
If the only component of wine worth mentioning was the alcohol that would be very true, and she could still end up doing that, or end up with an early drinking low alcohol beverage about the same as strong beer. The thing is if she ends up fermenting the stuff longer more and more flavor development happens during the fermentation of the juice. For instance if I made a strawberry wine and then took strawberries soaked in vodka for a few weeks and watered it down to 14% alcohol the qualities of said beverage although alcoholic would have no similarities whatsoever. Bouquet or aroma is developed through chemical reactions that occur throughout the fermentation and then further though the aging process.

Besides man, sugar is way cheaper than vodka!

so the fortified anything will not age even if you are just bringing it up a few % points not over loading it to 20 %. also .. what is the % acohol that would determine early drinking .. does it just not have the alcohol content to protect itself . does it turn ? <10 %

so the fortified anything will not age even if you are just bringing it up a few % points not over loading it to 20 %. also .. what is the % acohol that would determine early drinking .. does it just not have the alcohol content to protect itself . does it turn ? <10 %

Wow, Tony... decaf dude. Really.

No everything ages, but the development of flavor happens A. During the fermentation process which is a chemical process done by our good friends the yeast. AND B. After said friends produce all sorts of stuff and in the process color, tannins, flavors, and many many other chemicals and acids are released from the fermentation they react slowly with one another which is what a lot of people just plain call "aging".

In other words you will get more flavor and zing and color etc from fermenting your must with a potential alcohol up to about 14% because of the time involved and the other processes that include fermentation. Fortifying the wine should not effect the aging process of the product as long as you have sufficiently extracted all you can flavor and chemical wise from the fermentation.

As a rule the lower alcohol the faster it matures, and the faster it goes out the door too. 9 percent is not high enough to protect the wine. 13 is about the lowest you want to go. You can successfully produce up to about 18% if you feed the fermentation at the right moments, the right amounts of sugar, and the acid levels and nutrient level and oxygen level in the must and the temperature level is all nearly perfect. That and luck. Higher generally needs to age more but part of the aging can be bypassed by sweetening back a bit.

So feed sugar.

sorry for sounding a bit excited just trying to soak up the info .. so many questions so little time .. hahahahaah .

I disagree about the post stating that 13% alc/vol is about the lowest you should go. In most of the cooler climate growing regions, 13% is quite a high alcohol level. For light to medium bodied wines, 11.5%-12.5% is perfectly acceptable and shouldn't affect stability provided the pH level is in the recommended zone. Alcohol is only one of the components that acts as a preservative in wine, along with tannin and acidity. (and sulphite, of course!!) I don't have experience with Frontenac so I'm just speculating here, but being a hybrid, it is likely more suited to producing a lighter, fruitier style of wine for early drinking, rather than a heavy-duty cellar-dweller. If there isn't enough fruit concentration and extraction, high alcohol is just going to make the wine seem hot.

True enough if you don't want to cellar, but as far as I can tell by the mixed up numbers here, she started out with a potential of about 7.5 to 8 percent alcohol. When you make a wine out of hybrid grapes often the tannin level is off the charts which affects aging negatively. Now I could be really wrong with the numbers here, because she says she started with an sg of 1.060, but then two or three days later she says she started with 9.5 which I have to assume means balling or brix unless she was mistaken and thought she had 9.5% potential alcohol which I doubt is what she meant. With a balling/brix content of 9.5 you end up with somewhere around 5 percent alcohol if you are lucky. With sugar that low you almost have to add.

Problem I am having with this one is that I have no idea what she is making. I have no idea what sugar level she had to begin with, or acid level and ph for that matter. I don't know the temp at the beginning, what kind of yeast she used, etc. No idea. I don't know what she is trying to make either.

I have made false wine that is around 11.5-12% alcohol and it was ok. I agree about the alcohol level, but if you are making something that has a lot of tannics and other weird flavors that you end up with in a hybrid most of the time aging is a good thing. Acidity is an unknown factor here. Wine grapes generally should taste tart and a lot sweeter than a grape you would eat. YUM!

My experience with Frontenac is that it has high acidity, even at ripeness of 24 brix and some growers let it go to 26 to allow some of that to drop. In the UP of Michigan where I live that just doesn't happen easily as the climate doesn't allow it to fully ripen. As a grower you can try to allow more sun exposure by leaf pulling to help it ripen better. As a winemaker you have to use techniques such as adding calcium carbonate during initial fermentation, cold stabilization to 35 degrees, and maactic fermentation. All these methods will reduce the acidity. But the problem is even though the grapes tasted sweet, they hold that acidity through the winemaking process. Just bottling at this point will not result in dropping the acidity. You might try using Potassium bicarbonate acid reduction by blending an amount with a small amount of wine and then working it back in the wine. There are sites on the internet that will give you formulas for this process. I agree that next time you need to use at least a refractometer in the vineyard and use practices that will allow your Frontenac to come up to a higher brix. You can also blend them with a grape lower in acidity or make Rose' out of the grape and back add sugar after you reach sufficient alcohol. Back adding sugar at the end requires addition of Potassium Sorbate and Potassium Metabisulfite to stabilize, but don't add sorbate if the wine has gone through maactic. Hope this helps for the future.