No Taste - What now?

[Stan1]

Its been awhile since I posted, been patiently waiting for my grapefruit wine to age before bottling (many thanks to those for their help late last year).


Well, I went to taste the wine before bottling, and there is no taste. An alcohol taste, but no flavor of grapefruit. What do I do? 10 months down the tube??


Can I finish with bottled grapefruit juice or bottled grape juice? The sides of the grapefruit and white grape juice containers say refrigerate after opening. Dangerous?


I'm stumped. Please help.

 

[Wade E]

Ok, can you refresh us with the recipe? If you have not added sorbate and k-meta then do so before you do anything else. If you want to add flavor you can add either fresh squeezed or frozen concentrate or bottled juice. The reason I ask for the recipe is to determine what we are working with. In example, if you have a very high anv wine form starting with a very high SG then we dont want to dilute the juice we are going to add so that we can lower the abv of the wine with juice. If you started with a lower SG then we dont want to dilute the abv and actually want to concentrate the flavor and sugar of the juice we are going to add by cooking it down on a stove in a pot so that we dont dilute the abv too much and make this wine weak.

 

[Stan1]

Thanks Wade for your help. The grapefruit recipe Follows:


30 Grapefruit
30 pts water
11.25 lbs sugar
1.25 tsp Tannin
5 campden tablets crushed
1 package yeast


Starting SG 1.080.
Sg Now .994


Aging time - around 7 monthsEdited by: Stan

 

[Wade E]

The amount of sugar and the Starting SG do not coincide. Are you sure about the starting SG? Everything sounds like you should have had a starting SG around 1.080 - 1.085. Please recheck this as that would be a abv of 6 and that is very low!!

 

[Stan1]

Sorry Wade. The actual was twice what I originally indicated, it was actually 1.080. Edited by: Stan

 

[Wade E]

Good, thats much better. That gives you an abv of 11.3% which is good for this type of wine. If you can find a frozen grapefruit concentrate in your local grocery store then that would be the easiest way go. I would buy 2 or 3 and add each 1 slowly tasting frequently to make sure you dont over do the sweetness or flavor profile. If you can not find that then you could do the fresh grapefruit and squeeze a few and go that route or buy some bottled grapefruit juice and go that way. Please make sure that you have added k-meta and sorbate so that you dont re-ferment this batch. You may have to clear this wine again cause most grapefruit juices have pulp in them. For that I would either wait again for a few more months while it clears or add a fining agent like KC SuperKleer which will do its thing in a fe days but give it a week to make sure al has fallen out!

 

[Stan1]

Thanks Wade. You are a lifesaver!


I have a bottle of Ocean Spray 100% unsweetened white grapefruit juice that I will add to this batch. I'll add k-meta and sorbate when I add the grapefruit juice, as you instructed.


I'll order some SuperKleer tonight.


Thanks again. This forum is great.Edited by: Stan

 

[Wade E]

Sweetening the wine will help bring out more flavor to.