While re-reading a different thread, I realized there's no reason skin packs can't be added to a grape wine, or a country wine for that matter. For grape wine, this should do what it does for kits, boosting color and body, about the same as Saignée.
adding skin packs to a grape wine
- Thread starter winemaker81
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This is the first I've seen of this product. I have experience with other brands of skin packs, so I expect it will work.
Additionally you can add oak shreds or chips during fermentation, which act as "sacrificial oak", protecting the natural grape tannin, preserving color, and improving body.
Aging oak will help as well.
Ohio Bob
Senior Member
A really cost effective fix is to separate your juice bucket into 2 buckets and put a different yeast into each one. When the SG gets to about 1.020, the yeasts have defined the flavor, whatever else you do is not going to affect the flavor anymore (for example... finishing it off with EC1118). After combing the buckets back together (here is where I pitch the malolactic bacteria) the wine will taste better than either of the two by themselves.
My wines used to be what I called “singular”, that is they either had an upfront flavor but no finish, or a mid palate, but nothing else. When I use dual yeasts, I tend to get an upfront flavor, followed by a mid-palate, and sometimes even a finishing flavor. I’m still evaluating how to execute this, as I believe each grape varietal will behave differently with the available yeasts to try. I also split the buckets 50/50, but if I was a large producer, I would blend the two yeasts back at bottling at whatever ratio made the most sense. I don’t have the infrastructure to do that so I make an executive decision to make life easy and stick with 50/50.
Giving credit to @joeswine for that tweak a few years ago.
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