Winebuddy cabernet sauvignon project

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tonyhibbett

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I ordered this by mistake some time ago and it remains unopened. It makes a poor red, made of just 20% grape. I still have masses of apples on the tree, 2 cans of Youngs Definitive medium red which passed their best before date in July and 1.4 kilos of dried elderberries (sold as wild bird food!) which won't last forever, plus a kilo of Wilco brewing sugar I got cheap in their sale some time ago. It would make no economic sense to assemble all these ingredients new, but it certainly makes sense to use up old stock and fruit that would otherwise rot. The plan is to make a chianti, based on an old Acton & Bryant recipe.
The starting point would be to juice 5 kilos of apples to make 3.5 litres of juice as a base and add a fifth of the gjc to make it red and raise the sugar level, plus some dried elderberries to deepen the colour further, possibly topping up with brewing sugar to get to 1090, if required. Get this lot going with yeast, nutrient and pectolase in a 5 gallon bin as a starter. Then add another batch and so on on until there is 5 gallons.
The reason for doing it in batches is because picking, washing, juicing and pulp pressing 5 kilos of apples takes a lot of time and effort, plus all the cleaning of equipment, so that the tiny kitchen can revert to its normal function in time for a much needed lunch to be prepared, after which I am certainly in no mood to go back to the grind, having imbibed the fruits of previous efforts!
 
I made a start by opening a can of 'expired' Youngs Definitive red compound. Apart from tartrate crystals, it seemed ok. I transferred the contents to a plastic 1 litre bottle, which registered 720 ml. Not much of a start, but a start, nonetheless!
 
The 2 cans of Youngs Definitive red compound plus the litre of Winebuddy red gjc would amount to about 500 ml per gallon in a 5 gallon brew, around 40% grape, similar to Muntons premium and Cellar 7. By replacing most of the water and much of the sugar with apple juice, plus dried elderberries and the flavouring pack, it can hardly fail to produce something robust.
 
Despite the first frost, the apples are still on the tree, in huge quantities. As I am running a bit low on 'house white', I will start a basic Winebuddy sauvignon blanc and wait for my son to help set up a production line next weekend to pick and process all of the apples, resulting in many gallons of juice, some of which will go into this projected brew, the rest into cider which will then be processed into something which cannot be discussed here.
 
With the threat of very cold weather to come, I picked 2 bucketloads of apples, from which I got 9 litres of juice, to which I added a kilo of cold-washed dried elderberries. The washing is important, I have discovered. You lose some colour, but a fair amount of crud too. Failure to wash then somewhat spoilt a previous brew.
To this I added the Winebuddy concentrate and 1 can of Youngs Distinctive red grape compound, plus pectolase, 2.4 kilos of sugar, and water to 20 litres, then the yeast/nutrient and oak chip packs.
The sg is only 1080, so more sugar will be needed. All that extra grape plus apple juice will probably only reduce the added sugar required by 1 kilo, and the pH is 4.2, which I changed to 4.0 with tartaric acid.
The plan is to pulp ferment for 3 days, remove the elderberries, add bentonite and enough sugar and water to raise the sg by 10 and the volume to 22.7 litres.
The mixture of ingredients is based on an Acton & Duncan French red recipe, so I was surprised by the low acidity. It suggests to me that the concentrates may not be based on wine grapes. The pH of the apple juice was 4.0. The elderberries should release some citric acid. The colour is already a deep red. Promising.
 
Overnight, the pH has risen to 4.3. I compared this with an unmodified Winebuddy sauvignon blanc. 3.3. Careful checking revealed that the latter still has pure grape juice concentrate, while the former now has none at all, except in the flavouring pack, and even that contains other fruit. The gjc has been replaced with apple and elderberry concentrate! This explains the difference in the pH and the reason why so much sugar was needed. Another reason for that is the kit is intended for 11% abv, not the 12% I am aiming for.
So I added the second can of Definitive, which brought up the sg to the desired level and brought the pH down to 4.0, then added enough tartaric acid to adjust this to 3.8, which is ok for the time being.
 
Adding the grape juice concentrate and tartaric acid seems to have stabilised the acidity, or maybe all of the malic acid has been converted to lactic acid. There is a third factor. There are salts in elderberries which act as buffers. As the dried berries break down, these salts are released, stabilising the acidity.
Using a translucent fermentation bin is interesting. There is hardly any sediment and the liquid has dropped to 20 litres as the sugar is converted to alcohol and carbon dioxide, the latter being collected in the elderberries, which rise like balloons and swell up towards the lid. Below this layer, the now familiar apple scum is visible, mostly covered by the berries, although some is now erupting through this layer, and is now within 1 inch of the lid.
I read that if using bentonite, it should be added after pulp has been removed, although no explanation was given as to why. I think it should be added at the start to control this 'volcanic' activity, which could get quite messy!
 
Most of the colour has gone from the elderberries and they taste quite bitter. This leads me to wonder if these dried elderberries are nothing more than pomace, the dried remains after juice has been pressed out. After all, they were sold as wild bird food, hence very cheap! Elderberry extract is sold as a health potion at a high premium price, as well as a wine kit ingredient. It is even possible that I have inadvertently rehydrated them with their own juice!
So they should come out, and be replaced with a syrup top up of about 2 litres with 440 g of sugar in it to get up to 5 gallons, while maintaining the potential alcohol. This will dilute the acid by about 10%, so lots more tartaric acid will be required to reach the target pH of 3.5. However, since the volume will probably decrease by the same amount due to the fermentation of sugar and inevitable losses due to initial racking and after fining, I will leave this adjustment until then.
The berries were easily removed with a sieve and after light pressing, weighed 1.4 kilos, leaving the must at 20 litres, topped with a 20 mm layer of pink-tinged apple scum, which, liberated from the weight of the berries, is rapidly rising, but easily skimmed off, allowing the space to add the syrup. Stirring this in produced more scum,which I removed, but surprisingly reduced the pH to 3.7, the opposite of what was expected. Clearly, the removal of pulp increases acidity, or rather, reveals the true acidity of the must, which is now still below 22 litres and decreasing as the scum layer continues to rise.
Removal of this next layer has caused the pH to drop to 3.6. Almost there!
 
I now seem to be into the elderberry scum phase, redder, denser and less frothy. At sg 1050, fermentation is flagging, so I added more nutrient plus vitamin b1, which has enlivened it. The volume is now 21.5 litres, so more topping up will be required. The pH has risen to 3.7, probably on account of mlf working on the malic acid in the extra gjc I added.
I put the pressed elderberries in a bucket with 2 litres of water and 400 g of sugar, which I can use for topping up.
 
It's a bit like Terry Wogan in the early days, broadcasting in the middle of the night with no idea if anyone was listening!
Well, for what it's worth, the sg is down to 1040, but the pH is back up to 4.0, so I knocked it back down to 3.7 with a heavy dose of the old tart, supplies of which are running a bit low. Even with that, the brew tastes horribly smooth and palatable, like mild cheddar. lager, latte coffee or a burger with fries. Gutless!
 
Flabby and flaccid are also used!
The pH was 3.6 this morning and the taste was faintly sharp. After a good stir to drive out co2 (containing carbonic acid) the reading was 3.8, with no hint of sharpness. The recipe I based it on was for a Burgundy style, ie pinot noir rather than cabernet sauvignon, which is said to a flavour akin to blackcurrant, concentrate of which is included in the flavouring pack, along with grape concentrate, redcurrant and 'flavourings'. At 1025, there is too much sugar to get much idea of the true flavour as yet, but the main objective of improved body and colour has certainly been achieved. It seems that claret, typically based on cab sauv, has usually undergone mlf. This would not have occurred with the basic kit. It spends 2 years in oak, so I have filled my neglected 10 gallon cask with water to test for leaks. So far so good. The plan is to put the current brew in a polypin, make a batch of Cellar 7 cab sauv and fill the cask, which at one time held 10 gallons of chardonnay, so has been conditioned. It is unlikely to confer any oak flavour, as it is very old, but will allow the wine to slowly breathe.
 
The concurrent Winebuddy sauvignon blanc is now clear with a spookily identical pH of 3.7. Foolishly, I threw away the packaging, but I suspect that this pack too has been replaced with apple concentrate instead of grape to keep down production costs. There is no doubt that apples can play a valuable role in wine production, but their natural role is for cider. You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear, any more than you can extract blood from a stone and there is nothing to be gained from flogging a dead horse.
Talking of which, I opened a bottle of California Connoisseur merlot which was only 3 months old. It was every bit as good as you would want from a red wine, given a chance to breathe a while and served with a meal. So the question arises: why bother with all this oak ageing? Sir Edmund Hilary had the answer regarding the conquest of Everest: Because it is there!
 
As the brew approaches its conclusion, at 1010, I can get an idea of the result. It seems that there are various mineral elements in elderberry which act as acid buffers. As a result, the outcome tends to be a pH of 3.7-3.8, despite my additions of tartaric acid.
 
tonyhibbett said:
Talking of which, I opened a bottle of California Connoisseur merlot which was only 3 months old. It was every bit as good as you would want from a red wine, given a chance to breathe a while and served with a meal.

I think you have summed up the cheaper end wine kits perfectly-you need a meal with it to enhance the taste!

I agree that the Cal Con red wines are fine as a table wine, but as a stand up by itself drink I find them very thin.
 
You could be right, but after a big roast dinner, the quality of any wine which follows could be any old plonk! My policy, for what it's worth, is to get the juices going with a simple dry white while preparing the meal, a decent wine with the meal and the rest is somewhat academic!
 
Tony-you may well be right-towards the end of a meal/evening I'm not going to be putting out my best wines. But to begin with I want something that starts the show with a bang.

New & improved Selection kits fit the bill for me. The Shiraz may be the best kit I have ever made

Or a nice bottle of blackberry......

But after maybe if someone bought some Wolf Blas.......it would still be rough as a badgers nads!
 
My strategy, if it could be called that, is to start with a dry white as an aperitif, open a decent red (unless it's fish!) and pour out a glass to breathe before eating the meal. Allowing a white wine to breathe in the fridge works wonders too.
Meanwhile the brew progresses, now down to 1002 and quite smooth tasting. The pH is now 3.9. It seems there are certain minerals in elderberries which work as pH buffers and 15% of their acid is malic. Because of this buffering effect, throwing in tartaric acid may well have been a wasted effort. The small batch of elderberry pomace wine is also 3.9.
After all the main brew is hardly a 'true' wine, with barely 20% grape content. However, it is clearly far better than the standard kit or a purely apple and sugar wine. It is many years since I made a purely elderberry wine, but I did pick up an old bottle of the stuff at a boot fair and I was much impressed with it as a pleasant drink in its own right.
 

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