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By Dan Mouer
There are lots of amateur wine competitions around this time of year. They tend to start up with county and state fair contests in late summer or early Fall. Everyone who makes his or her own wine should consider entering competitions. The feedback—often quite detailed and from expert judges—can be invaluable. November 21st is the submission deadline for Winemaker Magazine’s annual competition. Find out more by checking out their most recent issue or by visiting their website at: http://www.winemakermag.com/.
Last month I promised some suggestions for improving red wine from kits, and giving them your personal touch. Well, here goes!
1. Don’t think of kit wines as “fast” wines. Give them plenty of time to age in bulk (in the carboy), racking them every few months to improve clarity and stability, as well as to micro-oxygenate the wine. Leave them on the first set of fine lees for at least 3-4 months. Use 1/8-1/4 tsp sulfite, dissolved in some wine or warm water, at each racking. Better yet, learn to do sulfite and Ph tests regularly, and use sulfite as needed.
2. Age with oak, when appropriate. You can leave the oak that came with the kit out when you begin fermentation, and add it, bit by bit, during bulk aging to assess the level you prefer. Granular oak will give all the flavor and aroma contributions it has to give within 2 or 3 days. Chips are slower to react, and provide additional benefits due to slow reactions with the wine. Oak “beans” and staves are even better for long-term aging. Best of all—if you are prepared to use them properly—are oak barrels. By that I mean aged oak barrels, not new ones. New oak barrels are used primarily to impart certain flavors. They have no advantages over the far less troublesome powder, chips, and beans. Barrels that have been used a few times, on the other hand, are excellent for long-term storage, because they allow flavor components to become more concentrated through evaporation of water and alcohol through the wood, without making your wine taste like a liquid 2x4.
3. Try a kit with NO oak. Many of the kit wines make bright, fresh, fruity wines if you leave the oak out. You may find you really prefer that style.
4. Blend! The world’s greatest wines are almost always blends. Wine that needs more color, or acid or fruit or whatever may be improved by blending with another wine.
5. Add acid. Many kit wines are made in a fairly low-acid style similar to many California wines. They often lack liveliness. Wine should be refreshing! This can be problematic with kit wines, due to the fact that manufacturers have done their best to make acid-stabilized products. The best way to add acid is by blending with a more acidic wine. If that’s not an option, try adding a little bit of lactic acid. A touch goes a long way…you don’t want your wine to taste like sauerkraut! Tartaric acid and wine acid blends can also be used, but the flavors may be harsher and you may eventually precipitate much of the tartaric out again as “wine diamonds” (see last month’s column for an explanation).
6. If you like a “bigger” style red, try adding a little less water than the instructions call for. There was once a fairly popular little book that called for using much less water to make better wines from concentrates, but modern kits are carefully designed and balanced. By making a kit up to just 21 liters instead of 23, you will increase alcohol, acidity, dissolved substances, and color by nearly 10%. If you use much lower dilution, the wine may become badly balanced.
7. You could always add sugar to bring the beginning Brix level (or specific gravity) up a bit. Additional alcohol can add to the “mouthfeel” and complexity of the wine. Don’t overdo it, of course, or you’ll just make a “hot”-tasting drink best suited for dumping into a wine cooler or sangria.
8. Use different yeast. Different yeasts produce substantially different outcomes in terms of flavors, aromas, residual sugar, etc. Learn about the different wine-yeast strains available and try them out. You could even make up a kit, divide it into two batches, and pitch two different yeasts. You may decide to recombine these down the road a ways. Many good-quality commercial wines are made just that way: complexity is added by combining batches fermented with different yeasts.
9. Add tannin! Most kit wines are quite “soft” in the “spine.” Kick them up a notch by adding a teaspoon or two of grape tannin powder at the beginning. Wines will clear better and faster, will have greater color stability, will age longer, and have better complexity and mouthfeel.
10. Bottle age your wines under proper storage conditions. That means relatively stable temperature in the 50-65-degree range with moderate humidity. It also means use good-quality corks or other bottle sealers. Cheap corks invite a host of problems. Most kit wines are not designed for lengthy bottle aging, but many of the better reds will certainly continue to improve for a couple years at least. If alcohol level is over 12%, total acidity is at least 6%, and there is decent tannin in the wine, it will age gracefully for considerably longer than that.
11. If you bulk age your wines and add a bit of tannin, as I have suggested, you can usually dispense entirely with the use of finings. Try not adding the bentonite including with the kit. I never use it in red wine (and rarely in whites); it strips too much of the color and flavor. You probably won’t need the isinglass, gelatin, or chitosan at the end, either, although that may give your wine a fine “polish.” Racking is a better treatment—especially for reds—than fining.
12. Throw away the sorbate package. If you allow your wine to stabilize naturally and don’t bottle it prematurely, you never need the sorbate. If you decide to sweeten your wine a bit before bottling, you can use the sorbate (with a small dose of sulfite) just before bottling as an extra guarantee against refermenting in the bottle; however, sorbate changes the flavor of wine in ways I don’t care for at all.
These are a few suggestions for improving your red kit wines, and giving them a bit of your own style. If you have other suggestions, I’d love to hear about them and to share them hear with readers. Thanks.
Sorry, folks. I spent all my time last month making my own Virginia wines. I had no time to taste any new ones. I’ll get back in the groove by next month, I promise!
Copyright 2003 L. Daniel Mouer