Grapefruit Wine

[tannerman1]

Hi Folks
I made a gallon of grapefruit wine and I thinking that is no good. Made it about a month and a half ago and it been in gallon jug (from primary) for about four weeks now. I racked it off the lees and I'm thinking maybe it was on there to long, smells very yeasty (is that a word?) and tastes very acidic almost a chemical taste. I don't have an acid test kit but I did test the Ph which was at 3.2-3.6 approx.
Ingredients look like this;
6 Grapefruits
1 pint of pure white grape juice
2 lbs. white sugar
1 tsp. yeast nutrient
1 tsp. pectic enzyme
1/8 tsp. tannin
water to make up 1 gallon
1 pkg white wine yeast

Very new to wine making and this is my second attempt at making wine from non kit ingredients. Any thoughts would certainly be appreciated.
Cheers

 

[BernardSmith]

Never tried to make a wine with grapefruit - so take what I am about to say with several pinches of salt - or sugar---. I have a bias against using water in wine unless there is a good reason for the water but a good reason is not to dilute fruit juices. My guess is that you probably added about 3 quarts or more of water. I might have used enough of the grape juice to make the gallon.
Grapefruit tastes very acidic. You don't say what the final gravity is but if it is close to 1.000 then you don't have a great deal of sweetness to balance that acidity. You might want to stabilize the wine (so that there are no more active yeast cells when you add K-sorbate and K-meta) and backsweeten with some concentrated fruit juice (not sure what fruits blend nicely with grapefruit). I think that the issue is less about pH and more about TA. TA measures the amount of acid in the wine while pH is a measure of the strength of the acid. These are two quite different elements - So you can have a wine with a weak acid but which has too much of that weak acid to be pleasant (you can have a wine that has not enough of a stronger acid and is also unpleasant)... It is the TA that affects what you taste, not the pH. You want the TA to be between .6 and .7% but absent a test kit (and in fact all you need is a pH meter and sodium hydroxide, because the indicator (phenolphthalein) changes color at a pH of 8.2 so if you know how much sodium hydroxide you need to add to get a pH reading of 8.2 then you know the TA).
Bottom line? My suggestion would be to let this wine age (about 9 months more) which may be enough to allow the yeast to clean up and metabolize all kinds of organic chemicals they have produced and then consider backsweetening the wine to help balance the acidity..

 

[mikewatkins727]

Check out this web site from Jack Keller and his recipes. Sounds like you need to let it age awhile.

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques20.asp

 

[tannerman1]

Thanks for input guys. They say patience is one of those virtues, guess I'll find out. I'll rack as Keller states and stow it away for a while and move on to my next science project...err wine