Blending

[OldCanalBrewing]

I have a few bottles of "too sweet" concord. I also have a one gallon carboy of fresher concord that I am "oak-aging". Same recipe. It's just that I back-sweetened the now bottled concord too sweet. Is it possible to blend the sweet bottles to the oak-aging carboy wine to calm down the sweetness? The sweet bottles are almost one year old though.

Thanks

 

[robie]

I have a few bottles of "too sweet" concord. I also have a one gallon carboy of fresher concord that I am "oak-aging". Same recipe. It's just that I back-sweetened the now bottled concord too sweet. Is it possible to blend the sweet bottles to the oak-aging carboy wine to calm down the sweetness? The sweet bottles are almost one year old though.

Thanks

Absolutely. experiment away with blending, that's how we learn. As long as the bottled wine was properly sulfited, you can open them and blend them.

 

[OldCanalBrewing]

Yes. The first sweet wine is all good on the sulfited end.

Thanks!!!!

 

[ckassotis]

Absolutely. Suggest doing a small-scale trial before you go ahead and add them though! Last thing you want to do is end up with a larger batch of wine that is still sweeter than you want, or something of the sort.

 

[Rocky]

OCB, I assume that you have sorbated the Concord that is "oak aging," and that it is fermented fully to dry, right? If you have sorbate in the "too sweet" bottles and have not fully fermented and sorbated the dryer wine, I would do so before blending.

As Ckassotis points out, do a bench trial first. Open one of the sweet bottles and pour a few ounces in a glass and put a few ounces of the dry wine in another glass. You might want to start 75% dry, 25% sweet or whatever, so take a syringe and draw 6 ml of the dry and mix it with 2 ml of the sweet. Swirl it to blend and then taste it. Repeat with different porportions until you find the taste you like and then blend the remaining wine in the same porportion.

 

[OldCanalBrewing]

I will get some syringes and try it that way first. Thanks!!

 

[Rocky]

OCB, I attended the Pittsburgh AWS Amateur Wine Confernece last week end and one of the seminars was "Blending in the Zinfandel Patch" which talked about blending wines and how to go about it. This is the procedure we used in the "hands on" seminar.