2009 Wine Update

It has been a while since I have updated my wines.

2008 Merlot
For the record, I am very pleased with the 2008 Merlot. It turned out very well, and I only wish I had made more. It was made from juice that I bought from California, and it is very lightly oaked. Wonderful.

2008 Pinot Grigio
The 2008 Pinot Grigio is a decent white wine, but I am not overly enthusiastic about it. It does not have the grapy flavor that I was hoping for. My friends like it better than I do. I bottled this one early last year, and there is not that much left.


2009 Cherry
The star of my fruit wines from last year is the 2009 Cherry. It has an intense cherry flavor, that has mellowed from the cough syrup variety to a fragrant and tasty mixture. It is strong though. I know I mis-measured the sugar content, and this wine almost too strong. I probably should blend it off with something. The wine has matured well, and I have been drinking it since Christmas.


2009 Blueberry
The blueberry fruit that this was made from were so inviting that I made this wine without enough research. The wine has a tannin flavor without a lot of fruitiness. Its best attribute is its pleasant fragrance, but there is no flavor to match. I think it could be blended with a red grape wine to give complexity. Not so good on its own.


2009 Apple
The clear loser of the lot. After a failed effort to press apples, I purchased juice. The apple wine is almost flavorless with just the slightest hint of appleness. I had been hoping to blend this with something -- like the cherry, but this wine wrecks whatever it touches. It is probably destined to be poured down the drain. It is slightly better if I sweeten it with honey, but I think it is a waste of good honey.


2009 Merlot/Syrah
I made this from two cases of Merlot grapes and one case of California Syrah grape. I am quite happy with this, and only wish I made more. It is still aging, but it is drinkable already.


2009 Riesling
I made this wine from grapes, and allowed the skins, which are white (of course) to soak overnight with the wine, so it is more amber and more grapey than most Rieslings. The wine has the color of the juice that is picture below. It is a dry Riesling, at least right now. I am not above taking a portion of this and sweetening it.

I tasted it yesterday, and it has a harsh flavor to it that I don't like. I am hoping that is still yeast, and that it will age out. I am not in a hurry to bottle this one. It is possible that I should filter it.


2009 Zinfandel
When I made this wine last fall, I was thinking that I did not get the yield out of the Merlot/Syrah project, and decided to visit the grape store again. At the time, they OLD VINE NAPA VALLEY, and I put one case it. All these grapes were really nice looking.

Now that the wine has aged this far, the wine is drinkable, but far more tannin-y than I'd like. This is despite the fact that I did not add any oak chips It is less fruity than I wanted. It is a good candidate for blending with the Blueberry or the Riesling.

I racked this one yesterday, and it is drinkable, but too harsh.

Does "blintzes" rhymes with "kisses?" -- A Valentine's day blintz recipe

I was working on some bad Valentine's verse, and I was looking for a rhyme for kisses. I did not like "misses" or "hisses"; rhymer.com suggested blintzes. I don't agree that "blintzes" rhymes well with "kisses", but I don't write good poetry.

Anyway, this got me free associating on cheese blintzes. ["Blueberry blintzes" doesn't fit the meter of my poem.]

I liked this blintz video, so much that I wanted to post a link here.

http://video.about.com/kosherfood/Easy-Cheese-Blintzes.htm

I liked how nicely this was produced. This is a style that I think I might try to copy.  John Mitziwich, the cook, is friendly and likeable.

Having said that I'm not planning to make a blintz. I am going to make a cheese blintz filling and put it in a flakey puff pastry. I will use the easy blueberry sauce though.

What rhymes with pastry?

USB Wine

Click here to watch the video, which is great. I need to get one of these!  



























The video is pretty funny. Even funnier in French.

All about Chianti

I found a great article on Chianti on Slate. Here is the second paragraph. (I have upgraded my journalistic standards, so I don't just swipe whole articles anymore.)

The constant wrangling over Chianti has been part of a broader debate in Tuscany concerning the role of sangiovese, the region's signature grape. sangiovese, which means "blood of Jove" and is indigenous to Tuscany, was traditionally regarded as too coarse and tannic to stand on its own and was believed to perform well only when blended with other grapes. Beginning in the mid-1800s, the accepted formula for Chianti was to mix sangiovese with a hefty percentage of canaiolo and two white wine grapes, trebbiano and malvasia. This recipe was enshrined in 1967, when the Italian authorities ruled that Chianti had to be an amalgam of these four varieties and that the white grapes had to account for 10 percent to 30 percent of the final blend. But there actually wasn't much synergy between the white grapes and sangiovese, and this unhappy marriage, coupled with excessive crop yields, inferior vines, and poor winemaking, produced a lot of rotgut.

My big thing with Chianti is that you don't know what you are getting. A good Chianti is wonderful, but the bad Chianti's out-number the good ones. As with most wines, the expensive ones are necessarily the good ones. The nice thing about Chianti is their unpretentious ness. They are friendly and accessible.

The other aspect of Chianti is that it is a blend of red wine with white wine at 10-30%. This is something traditional in Italian wine that Italian-American wine makers do. My brother gave me some white-red blend like this over Christmas, and it was pretty good. Soon I was mixing my 2008 Pinot Grigio with Australian Syrah, and pleased with the result. It certainly helps the Syrah.

The other thing about Chianti is the straw covered bottles, that are cute for a while then tacky. They are called fiascos. The nicer Chiantis don't have them. I encounter fiascos all the time. (According to the OED, the two definitions of fiasco are not related.)

I think of the problematically-named Dago Red as a blend of red and white grapes. That is the recipe that they give out at California Wine Grapes, my local grape source.

More on the Redox Potential of Wine

I continue to be interested in the change in wine as it is exposed to the air.

One way to measure that is with the redox potential, which is measured like pH, but with a platinum electrode instead of a glass electrode.

Anyway, I got an article by Tomlinson and Kilmartin from New Zealand, (J Appl Electrochem 29:1:9 (1997) 1125-1137), and they explain how there are a multitude of redox couples active in a bottle of wine.

The electrochemical potential is a thermodynamic property, but in wine there are multiple equilibria, and we typically don't want the wine to degrade before we measure it at equilibrium. People often want to test it in as it is stored in the bottle, and after several months or years - it must be fairly stable. My interest is in the rapid change in tannin, fruit and other flavors as the wine breathes. It strikes me that there must be a lot of chemistry happening all at once.

Tomlinson & Kilmartin also point out the pH generally correlates with reduction potential -- perhaps because H+ ion is involved in a lot of the reactions. This is good for me since I am unlikely to buy a platinum electrode for my wine shop.

Zoecklein from Virginia Tech prepared the chart above showing different kinds of equilibria in wine. Most notable is the oxidation of ethanol to acetaldehyde or ethanal. Bad because acetaldehyde is poisonous, and because there is 13% alcohol for the reaction to work with. I am also interested in trying to control the redox potential with ascorbate rather than sulfite to avoid the flavor problem.

The 2009 Zinfandel

One of the big disappointments from the 2009 Merlot is that there is only 28 liters of it or about 8 gallons. I really wanted twelve gallons.  As I was making the Riesling, I had the problem of being about 1 gallon of juice short to fill the demijohn. I could have put commercial wine in, but I wanted it to be more homemade.
I devised the idea of buying a case of Riesling grapes, topping off the Riesling demijohn, and then mixing the rest with a new batch of red.  What a great idea!

I went to California Wine Grapes in Detroit, in the Corktown neighborhood, and they were out of Riesling. The only grape they had was Muscato, which does not have a great reputation because people typically make a sweet wino grade wine, but it is often used to blend. I am glad I got it, since it had a wonderful flavor, and the grapes were good quality.

I also bought two cases of Zinfandel from Lodi California, and one case of Old Vine Zinfandel from NAPA VALLEY no less. Actually the Napa Valley grapes were on sale because I got them on Sunday -- having decided I was still short on juice. I don't think they are much superior to the ones from Lodi.

2009 Zinfandel Wine Recipe

108 lb Zinfandel grapes (one case from Napa)
24 lb of Muscato grapes
1.5 t (5 grams) bisulfite
5 g pectic enzyme

Allow to stand until warm or overnight

Red Star Montrachet Yeast





<<Update post>>

2009 Riesling Wine

On Saturday (10-Oct) I purchased two cases of Riesling grapes. I crushed them, squeezed them, and got about 5.5 gallons. I took the pressed grapes and heated them with about three quarts of hot water, and got about 6 1/4 gallons altogether. The grape juice was sweet even after dilution at 1.11 g/ml. I did not need to add sugar.

Riesling Recipe

6 gallons of fresh squeezed Reisling grape juice from 72 pounds of grapes*
3/4 t potassium sulfite
1/2 t pectic enzyme
9 grams (3 t) yeast energizer

*I actually crushed the grapes and added the sulfite, and then pressed the grapes in the morning. No doubt this is going to give me a darker color and more tannin flavor. On the other hand, there was no other way. I understand that California style Riesling is always pressed immediately, while European vintners vary.  Notice that the Riesling grapes are not really green grapes but have some color on the skin. The juice, pictured below, is a little red. It will be interesting to see how dark it is when the pulp has settled.

I used my new fruit press. I thought I was only going to get four gallons, but with patience coxed another 1.5 gallons out.

i put this in a ten gallon plastic primary fermenter and covered it with plastic. The wine has been fermenting for 21/2 days now, and is still sweet, but distinctly alcoholic --especially the fragrance.
















This juice was from DePalma in Ripon California. I have old DePalma grape creates from when my father made wine in the 1970's and the labels are almost identical.  Having said that the grapes were pretty dirty and had a lot of leaves. I took to rinsing them with water, and the first rinse water was pretty dark.