reverse engineering a commercial wine

[Rowdy]

im trying to get close to my wifes favorite wine, Valenzano's Shamong red Reserve. it is their standard Shamong Red which is a semi sweet to sweet concord table wine. the reserve is blended with Ives which makes it a more rounded complex table ish wine. i know i can take a sg and with the alcohol content on the bottle figure out the starting gravity and where to back sweeten, any ideas on blend ratio, tanin, acid etc?

Only info on their website

Shamong Red Our famous sweet wine made from locally grown concord grapes. Its fruity homemade characteristics make this a very popular all-occasion wine. Serve chilled or at room temperature with any of your favorite foods.

Red Reserve A new twist on a local favorite. Concord grapes blended with Ives for a darker, richer and fuller flavor but still retaining the semi-sweet and fruity taste that Shamong Red drinkers love.

I am mainly a beer brewer and can reverse engineer most beers using brewing software and info found on brewery websites..

 

[clight385]

Your own taste i would guess or any recon you get off the web. I tied that once and in a tastes test my friends picked my bend...

 

[hisse]

I would tend towards reverse engineering a grape wine being a bit different than reverse engineering a beer or even other fruit wines, grapes take on some unique flavours during fermentation, that being said it may be easier with a sweet wine, so if you want to give it a try I would say since you don't know the quantities in the blend just make a batch from each grape and blend to taste in small bench trials once finished.

You can essentially igore the sg of the wine you have for now, I would say start with the alcohol %, convert to brix/sg needed for the must(within +-1% or so), hopefully the grapes/juice you have will be around that number, if not adjust accordingly.

Once you've fermented dry and blended you can then treat the wine how you wish to prevent refermentation and back sweeten with either extra juice, sugar or something like wine conditioner to taste or based on sg of the wine, I would say taste is a better judge and again you will want to do this in small bench trials.

This leaves out the effects of yeast selection and any other treatments/finings the winery may use on the wine to get it where they want it but it will at least be in the same basic style. These are aspects of the recipe you would have to work on along with figuring out the right level of skin contact for tannins or use of bagged tannin.

Just my thoughts on the matter, it's a tricky undertaking but with some effort you should at least be able to make something roughly similar.

 

[Bartman]

As usual, the answer is, "It depends." At the risk of being indelicate, how sophisticated is your wife's palate? It would be an easier undertaking if she is not too picky, and that was one of the first wines she drank, and happened to like it. Because, as the old saying goes, to a hammer, everything is a nail.

 

[Julie]

Geez, Bartman, do you naturally make it a habbit to put your foot in your mouth?

Here's a guy who is asking for some help and you trash his wife? Please think first before making such posts.

 

[cohenhouse77]

I have a very similar issue. My wife is very picky and only likes a wine called Murielle Shiraz with Raspberry, Boysenberry, Blackberry infusion. I took a shot in the dark that it was the berryness she enjoyed so I made about 20 different batches to let her taste so I could figure out what she liked and didn't. She likes the "Dragons Blood", but won't drink it faithfully. It's pretty bad when we go to a friends house, and I bring several bottles of my wine for them to try, and she brings her wine because that's what she wants to drink. It really instills a lot of faith in what I have made! Although I am up to the challenge. I know that one day I am going to find a blend that she thinks is outstanding and we will never buy wine again.

 

[Runningwolf]

I have a very similar issue. My wife is very picky and only likes a wine called Murielle Shiraz with Raspberry, Boysenberry, Blackberry infusion. I took a shot in the dark that it was the berryness she enjoyed so I made about 20 different batches to let her taste so I could figure out what she liked and didn't. She likes the "Dragons Blood", but won't drink it faithfully. It's pretty bad when we go to a friends house, and I bring several bottles of my wine for them to try, and she brings her wine because that's what she wants to drink. It really instills a lot of faith in what I have made! Although I am up to the challenge. I know that one day I am going to find a blend that she thinks is outstanding and we will never buy wine again.

Hang in there. Just a suggestion, give George a call at Fine Vine Wines and explain to him which wine your wife likes. He's pretty good at picking out a kit close to it oir he'll tell you if he can't. I know this is not like making it from scratch but it's a heck of a lot cheaper then buying it bt the bottle. There's a lot of high quality kits out there.

 

[Rowdy]

thanks for the input, i work in a brew and wine on premises and haven't found a kit anything close thats why im trying to reverse engineer this particular wine. She doesn't have as a refined palate as i do but is very good at picking out the reserve from other commercial versions of the same style, she will drink other wines but is totally sold on this one in particular. i was planning on getting a couple juice buckets and doing a series of 1 gallon test batches. i guess i was looking for an easy way out lol. i guess i can also go to the winery and maybe get more info from them directly.