High Gravity winemaking.

[twissty]

I'm trying something a bit different with a concentrated Pinot Noir wine kit.

I've taken the concentrate from two wine kits and reconstituted them both to a total of 23 litres. My plan is to rack it into a big demi-john and bring the volume up to 46 litres with water after the initial fermentation is nearly complete.

I got a crazy starting SG of 1.160, it's almost syrupy. I'm not certain that the yeast will even get started in this kind of environment (it's Lalvin EC 1118). I guess we'll see. If it doesnt take off in a few days, I can always dilute it into two batches and proceed from there.

I've tried a similar procedure in making beer. What I found is that it would ferment out a bit more dry than the recipe normally would. I've read that Commercial breweries sometimes do this to get more production capacity.

 

[petes]

Hmmm.... looking at your post. I wanted to try a few things a while back and threw something together that resulted in an OG of 1140. Tossed a generic no name yeast at it which took a while to get out of bed, but eventually did. Ran out of grunt at SG1030, at which stage I racked it and left it to age.
EC 1118 is my usual yeast, don't exactly have a lot of choice here but I've been satisfied with it - suspect if I'd used it here would've got down to 1010, maybe lower.
Curious as to how yours went, if you were able to follow your original plan?

 

[twissty]

Well, it's been a bit over a week and its not doing much yet. It is in my garage and it's at the low end of the temperature range for 1118 so I'll give it another week or so before i do anything to it.

 

[petes]

I have another wine I thought I'd stuffed when I added final sugar at ABV 17.93%. It's intended to be a dessert style.
Racked yesterday following 2 weeks of no visible activity to find things had been quietly ticking it up to a new ABV of 21.2%
That's EC 1118; don't know how much further the yeast will carry. Keen to find out.

 

[Bblanche]

Wow that sounds complicated!
I never did wine myself but i probably will try it out once ... I get great ideas here from u.