Wine salvage

[tonyhibbett]

Yes, I also bought a 5 litre cask for my home made apple brandy, using cider made from my apple tree. However at 5% abv, 40 litres were required to make enough to fill the cask with 40% abv brandy and I only had enough to make 3 litres, so I filled the cask with red wine fortified with the brandy to 20% abv to make a sort of port. After a few months, I ended up with just 3 litres and the new oak flavour was excessive.
I just read that distillers expect to lose 3.5% in the first year and 2% each successive year from each traditional size whisky barrel. So a 12 year old malt will have lost 25%.
It seems that the 20 litre size is proving popular with distillers due to the faster maturation rate, at the cost of faster evaporation rate. It seems that alcohol starts to evaporate at 60% humidity and above. That level of humidity would be pretty normal in the Highlands of Scotland. Even here in London this morning the sun is shining but the humidity is 85% outside.

 

[tonyhibbett]

The polypin has arrived. I have reinforced it with gaffer tape. I have a cask full of red wine made with grape, apple and elderberry. It's been in there for 15 months so I will transfer it to the polypin where it can age without risk of evaporation or infection. By definition, a 'pin' is a cask with a capacity of 4.5 gallons, (20 litres) such as the one in question. However a polypin will hold 22 litres. After racking, I will probably have 19.5 litres at most and will need to top up the polypin with 2.5 litres to avoid airspace. Fortunately I still have 8 bottles of the kit cabernet sauvignon reserved for topping up, which now doesn't seem that excessive!
The empty cask can go outside, filled with water, and the polypin can take its place. Once that's done, I will only have 6 casks of wine left to manage, thankfully!

 

[tonyhibbett]

One of the casks held a Muntons cabernet sauvignon. This is truly a bottom of the range kit and is the same as the Wilco 30 bottle kits. 1.7 kilo can with only 50% grape juice concentrate, only half of which is actual cabernet sauvignon! That's the equivalent of just 2.5 litres of grape juice, about 12% of the finished wine! Taking account of the wine added to make up losses due to evaporation, that boosts it to level of a 'mid-range' kit at 40% juice. Adding in the benefits of oak maturation and a little ageing in a polypin, this has turned into a really nice respectable wine.

 

[tonyhibbett]

Did some more topping up. I think a good idea is to fill a 3 litre wine box and use that for topping up. That way, there is no part empty bottle left.

 

[tonyhibbett]

I opened a bottle of last year's cabernet sauvignon and found that too was acetified. The acidity was double what it should be. The solution was fairly simple. 3 g of potassium bicarbonate mixed into half a glass of the wine, stirred until the foaming stopped and slowly returned to the bottle by funnel, recapped, shaken, unscrewed until no bubbles rose, then firmly recapped and returned to the rack solved the problem.