Concordia Mera

We've been making wine from kits for a few years now, and one of the big things we've noticed is the variability from bottle to bottle of wines.  In our experience with beer, you get a good batch or not so great batch, but bottles from the same batch are pretty much identical.  

I have worked professionally doing cell culture;  I am really, really careful with our wine and beer making.  We are super careful with our bottle cleaning and sanitizing procedures.  We have tried a variety of corks including natural cork and plastic.  Nothing has seemed to solve to bottle variability problem.  We've even noticed the problem with home made wines from other homes - not just out own.    

Abram did a bit of poking around on the internet and decided that our problem was likely sugar/alcohol content that was slightly low allowing for undesirable growth of "bugs" after bottling.  

Our solution was to start from grape juice and yeast (the main ingredients found in any kit).  There are two ways of achieving the desired starting gravity SG (related to the concentration of sugars);  you can dilute grape juice to the right SG or you can add sugar (known as chapitalization).  

We ordered enough Concord grape juice from a growers co-op in Massachusetts to make about 10 gallons of wine so that we could try both processes.  The first batch had just grape juice, water, and yeast.  We diluted the grape juice to an SG of 1.090.  The second batch had water, grape juice, sugar, and yeast.  We diluted the grape juice to approximately the right volume, then added simple syrup until the SG reached 1.090.  

Today, almost two months after we started it, we bottled it.

We like to taste it at each stage just to see what it is like.  Usually, wines are not drinkable even at bottling, but this one was.  We noted a big difference between the fermentation time of the two batches (chapitalized went much faster and did not achieve quite as low a final gravity, FG).  Batch #1 was much better at this stage (and at racking about a month ago) than batch #2 (chapitalized).  We suspect a difference in other factors besides sugars.

To some of the bottles we added a bit of oak, stripped and baked at 425 F for 15 minutes.

Here's batch #2.

And here are all four sets of wine (non-chapitalized with and without oak and chapitalized with and without oak)- 51 bottles in all.

All gone.

Time to rest and reset,

and play a bit after all that hard work.

We'll let you know how it tastes after a bit of aging.