2009 Cherry Wine: in the secondary fermenter

The cherry wine fermentation took off after the first day, and the sugar disappeared. I let it go five days and filtered it through a nylon bag filter that I got at the wine store. I put it in an oversized demijohn, because I don't have one that fits.

I intend to wait a few more days and then put it in my three gallon carboy, and a gallon jug.

The top picture is the bright red cherry juice. The bottom picture is the five day old cherry wine. The change in color is real.

See the wine recipe posting.

Bentonite Clarifies the White Grenache

I am thrilled to report that 4 grams per gallon of Bentonite clay has clarified my White Granache wine. See the post below for the cloudy wine pictures.

Bentonite is a smectite clay with negative and positive layers. This means that it can grab a wide variety of proteins and drag them to the bottom of the bottle.

I dumped up all of my bottled White Granache, and put them in gallons.

I took the four grams of clay and added water drop-wise with stirring in a small cup-- like making a white sauce, and then I poured the mixture into the bottle. This helped the clay floated slowly through the wine rather than floating on top or sinking immediately. The slow stirring is important.

Now after six days the wine is all clear. This is a much better result than simply sprinkling the bentonite in the straight from the bottle. It also worked better than the Isinglass or the amylase, which did not work at all.

2009 Cherry Wine

We had a few good bottles of Michigan Cherry wine over the winter from Traverse Bay Winery, I decided to make a batch of my own.

I bought 23 pounds of Michigan Bing Cherries, and spent two hours cleaning them.

Cherry Wine Recipe

23 lbs Michigan Bing Cherries; stemmed, cut, crushed
3.5 gallon boiling water
6 bags of Lipton (regular black) tea

9 lbs of sugar
3/4 teaspoon metabisulfite
2 teaspoons yeast energizer
2 teaspoons pectin enzyme

Levlin 71B 1122 yeast

The tricky part is getting the cherry's crushed without breaking the pits. I tried for 30 minutes to get the pits out manually before giving up. In the end I sliced each cherry, usually twice on either side of the pit. I put the cherries into my "food mill" which is really a manual fruit press for making apple sauce. I mashed the cherries some, and extracted a bit of juice. Unlike grapes, cherries are not that juicy.

I collected a dozen recipes from the internet, and the amount of cherries per gallon varies from 2 lb-6 lb per gallon. I decided on 5.5 lb/gal. The sugar amount varies from 2 lb to 10 lb (on a four gallon batch). I started with 2 pounds, and kept adding sugar until I got to 9.

I boiled the water, and poured it over the cherries. Adjusted the sugar, added the chemicals, and allowed the cherries to cool overnight. In the morning I added the sugar, and put it in the primary fermentor.

Read more about the cherry wine.

My White Grenache is Hazy

The top picture is the 2008 White Grenache after bottling it, and about 6 weeks of storage. The bottles all have a a white sediment. If I decant off the sediment, then the bottle develops more haziness, which gradually settles.

The lower picture is the wine as it came out of the demijohn - and it was nice and clear. It also had a phenolic taste that disappeared after bottling.

Anyway, I think there has been some oxidation or acidification that has altered the flavor and knocked something out of solution.

The wine books have several more or less practical ways to clarify wine, like gelatin or egg white. 

I am tempted to dump up the bottles into a container, add sulfite, and let it settle by itself. After some length of time, I would filter it. 

My problem is that I don't have a five gallon container that is suitable, and the wine may spontaneously start precipitating something. 

Wine Flavors Introduced by Oak Aging

I am thinking about whether to treat my 2008 Merlot with oak chips, and I was interested to see this article on what chemicals are found in oak chips. To my surprise most of them have some sort of desirable flavor, with the notable exception of the trichloroanisole. I am surprised that there are trichloro compounds in wood at all. This one does not seem to have severe safety issues, but I understand it has the Champagne producers concerned about adulteration via wine corks.

Fernández de Simón and others have published the work of GC/MS work on several species of wood that are commonly used to store food and impart flavor to them. They made a lengthy list in J Agric. Food Chem 57:8 (2009). I have extracted out the most important components from American Oak that has been "toasted." There are several other wood species in the work. 

People should not be surprised to learn that wine scholars have been researching these extractives for years, and there is a lot published on them. 

The graph at right shows the relative proportions of the top ten extractives. There are many more. 

2,4,6-trichloroanisole (100 ppm)- This is the compound responsible for cork taint, and it ruins the flavor of wine even at nanogram/L levels. Smells like moldy newspaper

syringaldehyde(226 ppm), coniferaldehyde (96 ppm), sinapaldehyde (239 ppm) - vanilla related aldehydes

butyrovanillione (113 ppm) = zingerone = vanillyl acetone - also found in ginger; medicinal uses

Whiskey lactone (beta-methyl-gamma-octalactone) (32 ppm)- One of the main components of aroma in whiskey

Furfural (395 ppm) - almond-like, sometime describes as burnt; increases with the "toasting" of the oak wood

5-methyl furfural (34 ppm)- spicy, carmel-like, sweet

Racking the 2008 Merlot

I racked the Merlot today, and I was pleased at how much it had matured. There was only a small amount of sediment, which I washed out.

Based on my brother, Glenn's advice I am going to wait until fall to bottle this. In the fall, I will need the bottle.

The Merlot now tastes like Merlot with fruitiness, but also with a stringency and hardiness. It is not as fruity as Shiraz. It is not a very complex flavor though, still relatively simple. It is nice, and quite drinkable especially with food.

Of course, I don't believe that good wine should be drunk with food, since the food wrecks the flavor of the wine. Good wine should be enjoyed alone.

As mentioned below, the fermentation carboy is a reducing environment, and by racking it we let is oxidize a bit. Unlike the 2008 White Grenache, there is no bitterness.

I have not added any oak chips, which I contend are unwelcome to my palate. I did put a three tea bags in during the winter to get the tannins up. I think tea tannins are nicer than oak tannins.

The Reducing Environment of the Wine Bottle

I bottled out the 2008 Grenache, and have tasted a significant evolution in the flavor. Since I aged the wine in glass, and bottled it in glass, the wine has almost always been in a reductive environment. Reduction here being used in the chemical sense, meaning that chemicals are stable in the wine that would not be stable in the oxidizing environment of the atmosphere. It also means that chemicals tend have a lower oxidation state -- that is have more electrons. 

I had been thinking that bitter alkaloids were being oxidized upon contact with air. 

A good reference on this is riojalta.com, where I learned a lot. Riojalta says that the reducing flavor is desireable; but I am not so sure. Also I think that the process of racking and bottling improves flavor, by allowing the wine a chance to oxidize a little.