concord wine

Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum

Help Support Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Todd

Member
Joined
Oct 23, 2006
Messages
36
Reaction score
0
My wife really likes concord wine, we have found a few local brands that taste very good, Nissley and Clover Hill, in PA. Does anyone know of a concord wine kit? I assume that grape juice in the store would not give me the desired effect?

Todd
 
Actually most who like this type wine indeed do use Welches juice. You can find a multitude of recipes all over the net. I don't know of any type of commercial Concord Grape wine kits.

Smurfe :)
 
I'm probably missing something here, I was checking out the grape juice and all of them contain sulfites, this prevents fermentation right?
 
No sulfities do not prevent fermentaion, Sorbate is what you would want to avoid. Excess sulfites is fixed by areation before yeast is added
 
No sulfities do not prevent fermentaion, Sorbate is what you would want to avoid. Excess sulfites is fixed by areation before yeast is added

Ok, it said contains sulfites to ensure freshness I just assumed it was the bad guy. I'll give it a try here, I have some apple juice fermenting now.
 
Sulfite's do not eliminate fermentation. They eliminate bacterias. If you would of used fresh concord grapes to make your wine you would sulfite them in the beginning to eliminate potential bacterias and wild yeasts that could contaminate your wine. Look at almost every country wine recipe you will find. You add sulfite's during the initial stage. You don't add sulfite's at the beginning of a kit wine because they have been flash pasteurized to eliminate the bacterias and wild yeasts. Now high doses of sulfite's can slow or stop a fermentation as it will stop the good yeasts from reproducing as well but it takes quite a bit. Here is a portion of a post from another forum I moderate where we talked about this today.

Sulfites are not sanitizers in the legal sense of the word. They do not kill anything. So why do we winemakers call them sanitizers? Because virtually all of the organisms that can hurt our wine require oxygen to grow, and sulfites strip the oxygen from the environment. Sulfites are reducing agents and act as follows (I will use K-meta as the example here, but just subistute Na for K for sodium metabisulfite):

K2S2O5 is K-meta crystals. When dissolved in water it becomes:

K2S2O5 + H2O --> 2(KHSO3) potassium bisulfite; which dissociates into:

K+ + H+ + SO3-2

This compound has about the same acidity as wine, so it fits right in. Now, here's the kicker:

2 x SO3-2 + O2 --> 2 x SO4-

What the sulfite has done is strip the dissolved oxygen out of the water, rendering the bad organisms unable to act. Without oxygen dissolved in the wine Acetobacter can do nothing. There could be millions of cells, but they would be inactive.

The inverse is yeast. Over-sulfiting a must before pitching the yeast will not kill the yeast, it will just prevent it from reproducing. If you want to prove this just take 750 ml of must, over-sulfite it, bottle it, put in some yeast, put a fermentation lock on it, and leave it for 5 years. Eventually it will ferment to dryness.


Smurfe :)
 

Latest posts

Back
Top