6 August 2007
[Epi 10] TintoTV - Welchs based wine you say???
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We’ve made it to 10 episodes successfully, and we celebrate the 10th with the beginning of our first grape-based wine! We said we’d eventually move to making wine from concentrate (and we were referring to Winexpert types of concentrate), we’d thought we’d experiment with a concentrate that is cheaper and more readily available (before going to the traditional wine kit concentrate): Welch’s 100% Frozen Concentrate – Concord Grape.
Before we go into specifics, within 10 episodes we made it into WineMaker Magazine, and we want to thank WineMaker Magazine for including us in their Aug/Sep 2007 issue in their cellar dwellers section! Check it out, we are on page 10! Also, on page 9, you’ll see a reference to Winestock 2007, a gathering of home wine makers. Stephany and I are going to try our best to be there (Sep 28 – Sep 30 in North Dallas), hopefully we see you there!
OK, now, about Welch’s: we can use Welch’s Concord Grape 100% juice or concentrate because it has no preservatives and no added sugar (the only thing they added is ascorbic acid for vitamin C which we could have added anyway). Check out their product FAQ to learn more about their products. Based on our product code, our concentrate cans were manufactured on April 30, 2007 from the Welch’s North East, Pa plant. So we are making some 2007 Concord! Concord is actually of the species Vitis Labrusca; these varieties are more common for juices, jams, and jellies. They tend to be higher in acid and lower in sugar than the traditional wine grapes Vitis Vinifera.
Since the concentrate is made from unaltered grape juice, we have to measure the specific gravity and total acidity of our specific batch before making adjustments. We ended up adding NO acid blend and adding 1 cup of sugar. Our final SG reading was 1.086 and our final TA was about 0.8%.
Some new tricks we also tried: raisins??? This is also part experiment, but we’ve seen in recipes that you can add chopped raisins to help increase the wine’s body. We shall see. Also, OAK CHIPS!!! So, our home winemaking doesn’t allow for oak casks or barrels, so we have our pick of oak dust, oak cubes, or oak chips. We chose French oak medium-toast chips, sanitized them and added them to our juice/must (you can also add them during the aging stage, but we thought we’d start here).
Our blackberry wine is bulk aging in the 1-gallon carboy and our strawberry wine is at the end of secondary fermentation and is due for racking.
Viewers, have you tried this before? How’d it go for you? Rookies (like us), did this intrigue you? Any questions? Want to say hi??? Please comment below!
— Asad Aug 6 #
— FS Aug 6 #
— Nico Aug 7 #
— lauren rodriguez Aug 9 #
— Rich Aug 12 #
— Adam Aug 19 #
— Manoela Sep 13 #
— Juan Carlos Oct 2 #
— Erin Oct 7 #
— Jeremy Rodgers Jan 3 #
— Nico Jan 3 #
— Mike Jan 4 #