The same concern applies to cheap commercial wine, possibly more so. UK duty plus vat accounts for about £2 per bottle of wine. My local shops has wine for £3 a bottle. Considering production costs etc. plus some profit margin from grower right down to retailer, one wonders how wine can be made so cheaply!
Meanwhile, the brew has stopped at 1002, probably on account of the non fermentable sugars in the glucose syrup in the Youngs Distinctive grape juice compound. It tasted quite sharp, so I did a titration test and found the acidity level too high. I then checked the pH meter and found it needed recalibration, as it was reading + 0.4! I added potassium carbonate to reduce the acidity, after racking, stabilising, de-gassing, adding the flavouring pack and the finings. The volume is now 21.5 litres, which is consistent with losses from the generation of carbon dioxide, around 5%, so virtually nothing lost due to fruit sediment. After clearing, I expect to lose at least another litre after racking, so the final volume will be just over 20 litres. I plan to put this in my new oak cask, which was sold to me as 20 litre, but is in fact a pin, 4.5 gallons with little more than 18 litres capacity, even after soaking with water. Clearly the production system never actually got updated to metric, only the labelling, which tends to get rounded up! Anyway, any surplus wine can be used for topping up the level, as well as providing a way of comparing bottle maturation with cask maturation.
