Hi
I am new to all this have been a beer brewer for some time but made my first wine kit last week. My results are terrible! The wine is very thin and smells like grape juice. My hydrometer readings went from 1090-990. So the alcohol level was good so I finished it and went through the clearing process and my wine now is very thin and very sweet. Any help on how I can resolve this would be much appreciated or guidance in where I may have gone wrong.
Thanks
First and foremost, at one week of age, your wine is far from developed and has much change to go through. If your final SG was .990, it's definitely not a sweet wine, sometimes fruitiness can be interpreted as sweet. If you used the provided potassium sorbate in your wine, many describe the taste as a sweet / cotton candy sort of a taste, this will also subside as the wine ages, and potassium sorbate isn't necessary for dry wines (like yours) unless to plan to sweeten them later.
As your wine evolves, it will develop more of a nose (though kits sometimes are a little lacking there), and the taste profile will change, becoming more refined and spread across the front, mid, and rear palate. These things just take time.
The degree to which your wine will evolve also depends upon the variety and type of kit you selected. Pinot is a relatively light red wine in the scheme of things. The smaller the concentrate bag in the kit is, the more water you have to add, the lower the quality of the final product, is a general rule in kit selection. For instance, a kit with a 10 liter juice bag to which you add 13 liters of water, will generally not be as good as an 18 liter juice bag to which you add only 5 liters of water.
Lastly, and this is my own personal experience / opinion, the kit wines, particularly the reds, always have seemed to produce a wine that is lighter than expected when compared to grape wines of the same varietal. It makes perfect sense to me that the wines would be lighter, as they aren't fermented with the benefit of the skins, pulp, stems, and seeds of the source fruit. The process of extracting the juice from the must without putting it through fermentation just doesn't produce the same results as traditional winemaking. That said, the process is much easier and you can produce some very nice wines from kits. There are also things that you can do to enhance the flavor of your wines. Oaking, and finishing tannins are a couple that folks use pretty regularly. Do some surfing around on WMT, there are lots of threads that have suggestions, one of them is
https://www.winemakingtalk.com/threads/tweeking-cheap-kits.51904/
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