2013 Pinot Noir Project

The 2013 Pinot Noir is a project rather than a wine.

The story starts with the heart-breaking breakage of the demijohn of 2012 Merot -- of which only three liters survives -- the rest staining the floor red.

I painted the floor to obscure the stain as well as the memory.

Since I was short of wine, and grape season was over I bought fresh refrigerated juice, Melbec. The juice was poor, poor quality making just 7.3% alcohol had I fermented it, but worse it had no flavor.  Adding sugar would have brought the alcohol up, but it would still have tasted bad.

I decided to add dried fruit to add flavor and sugar. This seemed like a good idea, and I don't think the fruit had any additives that would prevent fermentation, but the fermentation stopped early leaving an awful tasting sweet, cherry-flavored mess. I tried restarting several times, but no luck.

One idea from the wine blogs had was to blend it with a rapidly fermenting juice, and that is why I bought Negro Toro brand Pinot Noir in May from Chile.  Wine Village in Hamilton Ontario contracts with growers in Chile to import juice to Canada. Hamilton is between Toronto and Niagara Falls -- our local grape vendor imports a truckload in the Spring -- for which you need to pre-order.

The juice I purchased was actually a wine mix as the label said it had added yeast, tartartic acid, and tannin. I wish I knew how much.

2013 Pinot Noir Recipe

6 gallons (23 L) of Pinot Noir juice
2.1 kg sugar
11 g yeast nutrient
2 packs of Red Star Premier Cuvee

I let this ferment for 2 days, and then I began to add the Melbec/Cherry blend. I added it slowing, and the must kept fermenting. Now it has been four days, and it is still going.  I am hopeful, but well, I have been hopeful before.

2013 Merlot-Cherry Stuck Fermentation

My 2013 Melbec/Cherry, which itself arose from the sad story of a broken demijohn, hardly fermented at all in the last five months. It is still sweet.

I tried restarting it with Yeast Energizer and a new packet of dry yeast twice.

I got desperate and read up on restarting wine, and learned that the pH should be 3.5-4.5.

I bought a cheap pH meter last year for this sort of problem, but I convinced myself that it did not work, and I threw it out. That left me with pH paper. My pH paper said the pH was over 5.

I decided to add the juice of seven clementines. The same clementines that I used in the mead a few weeks ago. The internet suggested one lemon for every two gallons, so I needed three in my six gallon batch.

I got some new Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast and spinkled it into some luke warm sugar water (about 1/2 cup with 2 T of sugar.) When it was foaming, I added some wine to it, about 1/4 cup. When that was foaming I added more.  When that was foaming, poured it in to the demijohn.

The third idea was to warm the demijohn. It is winter, and it is probably 68F in the basement. I got my seed starting mats used them to mildly warm the wine. Careful to allow headspace when you warm wine, since it will expand.

The next morning, it had foamed up, and was bubbling. The flavor was noticeably less sweet in just a few hours.

==========================================

Sept 2014: For a second time, I took a liter of my heavily fermenting new wine, and added to about 20 L of the stopped wine. This time it made a difference. When I tasted it in March 2015, the flavor had normalized, and it was not too sweet. :-)

2013 Mead

The 2012 Mead was so good that I was excited to try it again. I needed to ration it because we liked it so well, so I put it into 375 ml bottles!

The secret is the quality of the honey. The better the honey the better the mead. I also like a stronger, sweeter mead -- so use enough honey.

This year I ordered Wildflower honey from two sources in Florida. 20 of the 22 lb that I used were Florida wildflower honey. For mead, the darker honeys are better than the light clover honey that 4 year old like on their sandwiches. Darker honey gives a more complicated flavor.  I order them from

2013 Mead Recipe

22 lb  Wildflower honey
Water - to dilute to 20 L
2.5 t     Yeast Energizer
7 g       Pectic enzyme (about 2 t)
16        Clementines (with rinds, liquified in a blender)
1.5 t     Nutmeg
3 T       Ground vanilla beans (which we just happened to have)
1 Packet   Red Star Premier Cuvee Yeast


Notes
In addition to the wildflower honey there was 1 lb of clover honey and 1 lb of buckwheat honey.

The 20L of water was more than I expected based on last year. I needed to add 2 L extra because this honey was sweeter than last years honey. I added water until I had a density of 1.152 g/ml which should make a skull-crushing 18.2% alcohol, but it really won't. It will stop short and be strong and sweet.

Pectic enzyme is added since the clementine rinds have pectin.

I increased the nutmeg this year and skipped the allspice. I don't like the fragrance of allspice, and I don't see how it helps.

I used Premier Cuvee yeast this year since I was out of champagne yeast, but Curvee is good for whites.

Pot Pie Recipe

Pot Pie Recipe

1 cup sweet potatoes
1/2 cup potatoes
1 cup mixed veggies frozen
1 cup frozen peas
4 leeks
5 slices bacon
Flour
Butter
2 CUps chicken broth
1 cup half and half
Handful spinach


Preheat oven for 400 degrees F.

Make crust for bottom, put into pot pie dishes and cook 300* for 15-20 mins - 2 cups of flour and 2 sticks of butter, 8 T of water. Mix using Mosher technique, flatten the dough without mixing it. It is OK if the dough does not cohere. 

Cook the potatoes and some frozen veggies with 3 tablespoons butter for 15 minutes. Sauté the leeks in a T of butter until turning brown.

Cook the bacon. 


Stir 1/2 cup flour into veggies slowly, keep cooking for a minute.


Mix together chicken broth and half and half, stir into the veggies. Stir veggies constantly until thickened and bubbly, about 15 minutes. Stir in leeks and bacon, and additional frozen veggies until mixed in.

Spoon into individual pot pie dishes


Add crust on top, cut some slits for steam


Cook for 30-40 minutes

Based on recipe from 
http://www.food.com/recipe/delicious-chicken-pot-pie-10744

2012 Melbec & Cherry

The Melbec & Cherry starts with a disaster, which was the cracking of a 25 liter demijohn of 2012 Merlot, that leaked the vast majority of its wine on the floor. I am still sick about this, as the glass should not have broken when I tapped it so lightly.

Being too late to get more fruit, I thought I'd get juice to replace it with. I bought California Melbec juice because "Why not make a variety that I'd ordinarily never make from fresh grapes?"

After I got home, I measured the sugar content and it was very low. 15.9%! That would make a weak and watery 7.9% alcohol wine. Worse, the juice was watery tasting.  I think the processor, Regina, added water to the juice.

It is easy enough to add sugar to grape juice, but that does not fix the weak flavor. It would need 4.6 kg/11.2 lb of sugar for a hearty 14% wine.  I decided to add dried fruit after rejecting store-bought distilled spirit flavorings.

Raisin are the natural choice, but I don't like the over-oxidized "port" or "sherry" flavor of ordinary raisins. I bought a pound of white raisins. I also happened upon a box of dried tart cherries, which had been sweetened with sugar. Having made cherry wine before, I knew they had a lot of flavor. I also bought 1.5 lb of fresh cranberries.  They should add complexity.


I took the fruit mixed it with Melbec juice and chopped it finely using a kitchen blender. This will allow the sugar and flavor to get out of the fruit.



2012 Melbec and Cherry Wine Recipe

6 gallon --  Melbec Juice (Lodi Gold brand, California 15 deg Brix, 15.9% sugar)

4 lb --  dried sweetened cherries, chopped (Shoreline Fruit, Traverse City, Michigan)

24 oz --  fresh cranberries, chopped

15 oz --  white raisins, chopped (Sunsweet)

6 g -- pectic enzyme

11 g -- yeast energizer

6 bags --  black tea (Lipton)

2.3 kg -- sugar (5.1 lb)

1 pack -- Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast

I tasted the juice, and it has a strong cherry flavor that I describe as "cough syrup," and that my wife describes as "pie filling." It seems the cherry is overwhelming the Melbec. We will see how the flavor evolves. I hope to finish this as a dry wine.

Now that this is going, I will turn my attention to getting the wine stain off the floor.

This wine ultimately got mixed with remainder of the 2012 Merlot, perhaps 2 quarts that were under the leak-point on the demijohn bottle.

TCA Cork Taint and How did Trichloroanisole get in my Wine?

Trichloroanisole is found produced by fungus, often on
corks. 

Ever bought a bottle of over-price old wine and found that the bottle was spoiled? The fungus growing on the cork produces trichloro-anisole which wine-jocks say smells like wet dog or damp basement.

This brings up several issues: why arn't the corks sterilized? And where does the chlorine come from to make the trichloro-anisole? And most importantly, how poisonous is trichloro-anisole?

Why are natural corks sterilized? I am sure people try but cork is even worse than wood for sterilization. Cork might be quant, but it isn't a very good material, and probably should not regarded as food grade. Old fashion traditionalists need to grow up.

Some say that the source is chlorine-containing air pollutants on the trees that grow the cork. It is more likely that it is due to the wood preservative trichloro-phenol that is used with wood barrels. Another source of chlorine is from the use of bleach and related oxidizers as cleaning agents.

Chlorine bleach reacts with wine residue and living microbes to make chlorinated byproducts -- some of which may be carcinogenic. You need to rinse a lot after using bleach, and dirt that reacts with bleach may be hard to see -- but still could contain chlorinated compounds that are harmful. Trichloro-anisole is not carcinogenic however -- so don't worry.

The alternative to chlorine bleach is sulfite containing materials, and these make a familiar rotten eggs smell if over used. Not as dangerous as trichloro-anisole, but less appetizing too. The best is using ozone but that is not practical at home, or is barely practical. More on that later. Another non-toxic sterilization agent is hydrogen peroxide.

2012 French Colombard

Went to the wine store, and as is my custom, I walked around and looked at the grapes first. I wanted white grapes, and it was picked over as it is late in the season. They had seedless Muscato which I did not want and French Colombard. I tasted the French Colombard grape, and it was delicious. I bought four cases and brought them home.

When I got home I looked up French Colombard, and found it is popular, but not highly regarded. On the other hand it did taste good to me. It seems it is easy to grow but critics don't think it works well as a varietal wine.

I crushed and pressed the grapes. I took the raisins in the crates, and soaked them overnight in water to extract the sugar. I want to stress the citrus and floral notes so I added orange rind and columbine tea.

Sugar content of the juice with the raisin water was 24.3% which was determined from the 1.095 g/ml density and the 22.6 degree Brix refractive index. My target alcohol content for this wine is 12.5% alcohol which corresponds to 24.3% sugar so I added 2.1% cane sugar (710 g = 2.1/100*8gal*3.8L/gal*1.09g/L).

2012 French Colombard Wine Recipe

144 lb French Colombard Grapes (crushed)

9 g potassium sulfite (to kill wild yeast)

710 g cane sugar

10 g Pectic enzyme for clarity

6 g potassium carbonate (to reduce acidity)

Rind from three oranges

8 Celestial Seasonings Columbine tea bags
6 Twinings Echinacea & Raspberry tea bags

16 g yeast energizer

1 Packet Red Star Pasteur Cote des Blanc yeast

After one week of fermentation, I put 32 liters into glass for aging. Fermentation was nearly done, and the gas bubbling was pretty slow at 7 days. 

I have thought a lot about how to make the wine more floral, and herbal tea sees sensible. I am a little concern as I think the Columbine tea really tastes like straw more than flower, so we will see.


========================== 2 week update=================
I waited six days before transferring it to my glass demijohn, but now it is barely bubbling (fermenting.) I am worried that the fermentation has stopped.