Deezil--I see where you are coming from. But you're an experienced winemaker who has knowledge of WHY he's doing WHAT he's doing. I find it interesting that you're tasting your wines along the way. In 24 years, I have to say I've never done that. We do no evaluation of anything until we have wines that are aged--then we taste them and see if we want to oak, etc. Just a different style than what you do.
To say this a different way--so many people only seem to think that after a racking or two and manual degassing, their wine is stable and they can do anything they want to it including sweetening and using sorbate. And the wine is only 3 to 6 months old! There are so many new winemakers on this site and I don't want them to get started off on the wrong foot. For them, reading some of these techniques is the wrong info for them. There's more going on in a wine that you can't see---many things happening on a molecular level while it's aging that needs to be considered and not interrupting that by constantly manipulating a young wine.
I taste it all the way from the fruit, to juice, through fermentation, into bulk aging, before & after all tweaks.. The palette is the 'final say', so to not use it as a tool along the way, would just make it harder than it need be.. As the batches stack up, and I start to do the same fruits for a second/third time, I can start to pick out certain good & bad notes way earlier than they'd present themselves otherwise.
I like to try to remember what I tasted in the fruit & see how far it carries through the wine; also keeping note of the different flavors that come into play during fermentation (from the yeast) and how those meld/contrast with the original fruit flavors in the memory bank.. When the additives, oaks/tannins, etc come into play, the 'layers' become crystal clear in my mind because i've been layering them on my palette and into memory..
You've been making wine almost as long as I've been alive
On that second part - I wholeheartedly agree. People who can make a fruit/grape wine fermented, stabilized/sweetened/mlf'd, cleared, and bottled in under 6 months.. I really dont know how they do it. I cant. I just.. Cant.
The only thing I can think of is an insane under-usage of fruit-pounds per gallon (hard to even attempt, with grapes), something along the lines of SP/DB amounts. SP/DB only calls for 4-6lbs a gallon, and thats fine for that quick drinking wine-equivalent of a 'Mike's Hard'..
For anyone reading this, thinking "Thats me!"... if you wish to make a bottle of wine that can make the one of those people who grimace at 'homemade wine', change their mind, AND be holding a bottle from
several years ago.. You'll have to up the pounds of fruit / subtract the water, & it's a game-changer for the rest of the process; everything takes longer.
Even though I degas immediately after fermentation, and drop those gross lees out.. My wine still isnt newspaper-reading clear for 6-8 months, if then.. I dont use anything other than pectic enzyme & bentonite.. I know this is a clarifiying agent thread, but you dont want to strip all of that out of there too fast, or you miss out on the molecular reactions happening that Turock hinted at. Clarifiying agents can most-definitely remove compounds that impact the flavor, mouthfeel and aroma of a wine, so to remove those compounds too soon is to miss out on those reactions. These particles that drop out for the coming months post-fermentation wont spoil your wine either - there's really no hurry.
I dont even approach my bulk aging wine with sorbate & sugar until its over a year old.. The flavors havent came together enough, the alcohol hasnt settled enough - how do you know when its in balance if the other 80% of the wine is still trying to figure itself out? I dunno...
Where's Tom when ya need him?! When I first started making wine, I couldn't start a batch without him posting "Patience, Patience, Patience!".. And so many of these new winemakers are missing out on that lesson, without even realizing what they're missing out on!
