Christmas wine recipe

[David Violante]

I have mine sitting in small bottles waiting for a holiday… LOL I think it’s pretty acidic from what I remember also. I backsweetened with honey in the glass, but try a few different things to see what you like. We recently had the experience of someone sweetening their coffee with brown sugar. I usually put honey in mine if I need to sweeten it. Neat taste each of those…

I think you could also use a few different agents to make it less acidic, like yeast and MLF. And also drop the temperature for some time too. I just done like the taste or “mineral- ness” of using bicarbonate. Here’s an interesting article on some ways to drop the acid in wine making from the University of Minnesota’s Northern Grapes Project.

 

[Raptor99]

@David Violante Thanks for sharing that article. According to the article:

The most important thing to remember about biological deacidification is that it only affects the malic acid portion of your wine’s total acidity, but does not reduce tartaric acid.

What acids are present in cranberries? I found this reference to a study: Readers ask: What kind of acid is in cranberry juice? - De Kooktips - Homepage - Beginpagina

A key characteristic of cranberry juice is the low pH of 2.5 (Hong and Wrolstad, 1986) as well as the unique blend of the organic acids, quinic, malic, shikimic, and citric acid (Jensen et al., 2002), with quinic acid being the most preponderant of the four.

MLF will help to reduce the amount of malic acid, but it won't affect the other types of acid. So it might not be enough to reduce the acidity as much as you want.

 

[David Violante]

@Raptor99 good find. Lalvin 71B also reduces malic acid. In a Maine study of cranberries, fresh had a higher concentration of quinic (64%) but in frozen, malic and citric are just about tied at 42%. It looks like it would take a multifaceted approach, and back-sweeten.

 

[Raptor99]

Interesting. The page I found claims that quinic acid is predominate based on a study by "Jensen et al., 2002." The study you found gives a comparison with a study by Hong & Wrolstad (1986) that found quinic acid to be predominate (39%), followed by citric acid (32%) and malic acid (27%) (p. 96). The author points out that her study is on wild cranberries, while Hong & Wrolstad studied commercial frozen cranberries. That suggests a possible reason for this large difference.

 

[David Violante]

I’ve hijacked us to a side rabbit hole of wild fruit (maybe also into home grown) and commercially produced fruit and some of the differences. Very interesting… as a comparison I’ve always loved the small bananas you can find around the world and not the huge version we have here in the US. Those small ones have so much more flavor.

I think an answer to the question is to definitely back sweeten to taste. You could try different yeast strains and perhaps MLF and cold crash to varying levels of success, and of course a bicarbonate. Science and art. Thank you @Raptor99

 

[GaDawg]

I have a RJ SPAGNOLS CRANBERRY CRAZE that I would like to make into a Christmas wine. I plan to add 4lbs of sugar as a simple syrup and 1/2 the F-pack to the primary. I would also like to add cinnamon and cloves, etc. How much should I add, and should it be added to the primary or after the wine cleanse?
Thank y’all for your help!

 

[Jovimaple]

I have a RJ SPAGNOLS CRANBERRY CRAZE that I would like to make into a Christmas wine. I plan to add 4lbs of sugar as a simple syrup and 1/2 the F-pack to the primary. I would also like to add cinnamon and cloves, etc. How much should I add, and should it be added to the primary or after the wine cleanse?
Thank y’all for your help!

My only experience with adding spices to wine was an apple wine to which I added cinnamon and nutmeg during aging.

It was gross. It was only 1 gallon but it tasted plasticky because 2 whole nutmegs and 2 cinnamon sticks were way too much for 1 gallon.

My advice is to be very careful with the spices since you can always add more but you can't remove them once they're in the wine.

 

[Raptor99]

I would add the spices to the secondary, and as @Jovimaple says, be careful not to add too much. For my orange spice mead, I added to the secondary 1 cinnamon stick, 1 clove, and 1 whole allspice for 1 gallon. I wanted the spices to be fairly strong, so you might need to try less.

You can leave the spices in secondary for 2-3 weeks, and then add a little bit more if the spice flavor is not strong enough.

Wines wit spices usually taste better with some backsweetening.