experienced homebrewer, first time winemaker — does my must need adjustments?

[mcpusc]

i've been brewing beer at home for 15 years, but this is my first (serious) attempt at making wine. i got 50# each of zinfandel and merlot grapes, rented a crusher/destemmer and each variety produced right around 5 gallons of must. i ran pH and TA tests on the musts and these are my results:

merlot:
23.5 brix, 3.46pH, TA 5.10g/L tartaric eqv. [edit: bad data, re-ran tests below]

zinfandel:
24brix, 3.19pH, TA 8.1g/L tartaric eqv.

i added 5 campden tablets to each fermenting pail and 0.38 gram Lallzyme EX-V tonight. tomorrow night i will pitch a packet of Red Star Premier Classique. i don't have temp control, but the room i'm fermenting in is about 68, which should give a fermentation temperature in the low 70s.

I guess i'm mostly looking for advice on whether any adjustments are needed for these musts.

also wondering if there are any gotchas that my homebrew experience might lead to now that i'm making wine

thanks!

 

[Rice_Guy]

welcome to Wine Making Talk

* you will find that folks are all over the place here. You as a brewer have done 5% brews successfully. it works. ,,, What do you want? There is no rule to say 15%ABV is better.
* The Merlot is beautiful. The zin a bit high on acid. Consider running MLF on it to pull it down to 0.6%. Another consideration is cold crashing which pulls bitartrate out. If you cold crash as in a garage this stops MLF till spring.
* good luck, as a midwestern / northern hybrid fermenter your must is miles ahead of what I have.

 

[David Violante]

Welcome to WMT! Ditto to Rice_Guy, I don’t have brewing experience so I can’t help you there but it looks like you’re off to a great start.

 

[winemaker81]

Welcome to WMT!

My first suggestion is that 98% of what you know about brewing beer does not apply to wine. The one commonality is that both involve yeast fermentation. Everything else is different.

As David (@Rice_Guy) said, you'll get a variety of advice. You can get completely different advice on a topic, advice that is all valid. My suggestion is to consider why folks do what they do, and use that to make your decision on what to do.

The pH on the Zin is low, but it's well within range. I'd make no adjustments now. Taste test after 3-6 months of bulk aging, and make any adjustments based upon taste, not a test. Cold stabilization is a good choice to drop tartrates, which has the side benefit of helping the wine clear.

If you're going to try MLF, read the threads discussing it. There are numerous things to consider, including not adding more K-meta (Campden) as it blocks MLF.

 

[Jim Welch]

i've been brewing beer at home for 15 years, but this is my first (serious) attempt at making wine. i got 50# each of zinfandel and merlot grapes, rented a crusher/destemmer and each variety produced right around 5 gallons of must. i ran pH and TA tests on the musts and these are my results:

merlot:
23.5 brix, 3.46pH, TA 5.10g/L tartaric eqv.

zinfandel:
24brix, 3.19pH, TA 8.1g/L tartaric eqv.

i added 5 campden tablets to each fermenting pail and 0.38 gram Lallzyme EX-V tonight. tomorrow night i will pitch a packet of Red Star Premier Classique. i don't have temp control, but the room i'm fermenting in is about 68, which should give a fermentation temperature in the low 70s.

I guess i'm mostly looking for advice on whether any adjustments are needed for these musts.

also wondering if there are any gotchas that my homebrew experience might lead to now that i'm making wine

thanks!

Hi, longtime home brewer too before making wine. You’ve come to the right place! I’m of the opinion that anyone that can follow the process to make good beer can follow the slightly different process to make good wine! To that end I’d point you to this guide to red winemaking, if you haven’t seen it yet check it out, it’s in-depth without getting too bogged down
https://morewinemaking.com/web_files/intranet.morebeer.com/files/wredw.pdf
I’d tell you also that yeast selection and health are important steps here as they are in brewing.

 

[mcpusc]

thank you all for your kind welcome to the forum!

* you will find that folks are all over the place here. You as a brewer have done 5% brews successfully. it works. ,,, What do you want? There is no rule to say 15%ABV is better.

I’d tell you also that yeast selection and health are important steps here as they are in brewing.

: nod: i do have a fair bit of experience with coercing yeast to finish dry — one of my favorite homebrews is a high gravity barleywine, usually around 16% but one year I brought it up to 22%+ in imitation of Dogfish 120. i'm glad none of the techniques required for that one will be needed for these 15% wines =)

i forgot to mention it earlier but i did add Wyeast Wine Nutrient Blend to the must & have read up on punchdown schedules once the ferment gets going.

My first suggestion is that 98% of what you know about brewing beer does not apply to wine. The one commonality is that both involve yeast fermentation. Everything else is different.

i've certainly been out of my element working with the crush. handling fresh grapes has nothing in common with brewing and not having the boil to sterilize feels really wrong.... but i know theres a big difference between 5.2pH and 3.4pH too, microbiologically

As David (@Rice_Guy) said, you'll get a variety of advice. You can get completely different advice on a topic, advice that is all valid. My suggestion is to consider why folks do what they do, and use that to make your decision on what to do.

The pH on the Zin is low, but it's well within range. I'd make no adjustments now. Taste test after 3-6 months of bulk aging, and make any adjustments based upon taste, not a test. Cold stabilization is a good choice to drop tartrates, which has the side benefit of helping the wine clear.

thank you for that advice — i'm getting the sense that home winemaking requires more of a reactive attitude, to sit back and let your grapes tell you what to do, rather than trying to hit a very specific flavor target like i do on brew day. both the musts *taste* wonderful, the zinfandel is a bit tannic but its not in any way harsh. I have no idea how to map the juice flavors to finished beer flavors the way i've learned to with wort tho — judging as if this were a wort i would be very excited about the finished product. I've frozen samples of juice to have something to compare the aging wine to, i hope that can develop my palate a bit as well.

i think i'll leave my musts alone for now and let the wine tell me what adjustments it might need later on. thanks all!

 

[winemaker81]

@mcpusc, winemaking is a procrastinator's paradise. VERY few things require fast reaction. Once you get past fermentation, it's a matter of months or even years, not days or weeks.

I've written some whitepapers, often in reaction to common questions on the forum. These describe my take on things and what I do. Most will take 10-20 minutes to read. The basic winemaking process and sanitizing ones will probably be of the most help right now.

Additionally, I've written lengthy blogs in detail describing my experiences. These include pictures and I try to make the focus of each different. The current one is metheglin (mead with spices) and IMO it's an excellent example of how NOT to do batch planning.

 

[mcpusc]

The Merlot is beautiful. The zin a bit high on acid.

The pH on the Zin is low, but it's well within range.

well, i found my first mistake: turns out you're supposed to filter out the chunks before you run a titration

filtered out a couple new samples (and grabbed a pic for y'all) and ran them again, things look a little better now:

merlot 3.65pH 4.22g/L tartaric eqv.

zinfandel 3.34pH 7.05g/L tartaric eqv.

 

[winemaker81]

well, i found my first mistake: turns out you're supposed to filter out the chunks before you run a titration

Chalk it up to learning. If this is the worst mistake you make, call it a win!

 

[mcpusc]

.

 

[CDrew]

I started out as a home brewer too. Just my opinion, but there is lots of crossover. Making beer makes you focus on clean fermentation, and wine making benefits from good sanitary practices too. Beer benefits from O2 exclusion and so does wine making. Yeast choices are important in beer making and the same applies to wine making. Anyway, I think you have a huge leg up on most people starting out with your home brewing experience. Just knowing how to clean up after fermentation is huge.

The big difference to me, is that you make and drink beer right away, and with wine you make after harvest and then wait 2-3 years to really start getting into it. Your wine will be much better after 1 or 2 years than it is right now, but with your first vintage it's really hard to wait. That's OK, just make larger amounts in future years. My first few years, I'd bulk age a year then, drink 1 bottle per month the second year, to see how it was developing, then after 2 years I'd still have 5 cases left to enjoy. Now I'm well enough stocked, that I bulk age one year, then bottle age another year, and only then start tasting to see how it's doing. My 2018s and 2019s are drinking pretty well now. Even the 2020s are starting to mature. But the point is, wine making is an investment in the future.

One other difference, is that bleach is not your sanitary friend the way it is in beer making. There are theoretical reasons not to use bleach and instead use StarSan or other sanitizers. But PBW is great as a cleaner in wine making the same way it is in brewing. Highly recommended.

 

[Jovimaple]

@mcpusc Welcome to WMT!

 

[mcpusc]

is that bleach is not your sanitary friend the way it is in beer making.

i assume that goes for iodine as well; i normally use iodophor for sanitizing, d'oh. can't take out what's already in there from sanitizing the primary but i guess i'll switch to star-san from here on out. and hopefully what's there will drop into the lees...

 

[ChuckD]

Welcome. For me patience thing was the most difficult skill to learn.

 

[anthocyanin]

@mcpusc I just noticed your profile says you're in the PNW - as am I! May I ask where you sourced Merlot and Zinfandel? I have a Pinot fermenting now which is my first grape wine though I've done several other fruits and store-bought juices. I do enjoy Pinot but next year I may try to source a heaver-body varietal if I can.

 

[mcpusc]

@anthocyanin i can't help you there, sorry — got the grapes as a family favor; my in-laws' are napa growers and graciously allowed me to pick some for myself this year. def feeling the pressure not to mess up such nice grapes on my first ferment...

 

[winemaker81]

@mcpusc, more advice -- taste your wine every time you touch it, and record your impressions. During the first month, the wine may be totally different each time you taste it. After that it continues to change, but at a slower rate.

Once you bottle, wait a month to get past bottle shock, then open a bottle every 2-3 months, again recording your impressions. A year after bottling, read your notes, first to last. It will teach you a lot.

Your wines will probably be drinkable at the 6 month mark (from starting), but reds such as Merlot and Zinfandel will be far better at 12 months, and may need 24 months before they're really good. It's a totally different world from beer.

You'll net ~3 gallons from each batch, ~15 bottles. Put away a couple of bottles of each until they're 2 years old. If you're normal, the remainder of both batches will be long gone by then ...

 

[BarrelMonkey]

well, i found my first mistake: turns out you're supposed to filter out the chunks before you run a titration

filtered out a couple new samples (and grabbed a pic for y'all) and ran them again, things look a little better now:

merlot 3.65pH 4.22g/L tartaric eqv.

zinfandel 3.34pH 7.05g/L tartaric eqv.

Sample prep certainly makes a difference! But if you ran these numbers the day after crushing (as opposed to day of previously), it could also be due to 'soaking up' - Grapes release sugars, potassium amongst other things (particularly since you added macerating enzymes) which can cause brix to rise and acid to fall. (You didn't post revised brix numbers and it's probably too late if your ferment has started, but I would imagine it also went up.) See my recent numbers for my 2023 syrah for another example.

Since this is your first foray into winemaking I'd be inclined to leave things as they are, though keep an eye on that merlot pH/TA going forward. It (pH) may go up a bit after fermentation (and certainly after malolactic if you're doing that).

 

[CDrew]

Maybe I can offer one more bit of advice, and it's based on your very small volume of new wine. You will have substantial racking losses each time you rack, making keeping your container filled difficult. I would at least consider combining your two wines. That will theoretically decrease your proportional racking losses a bit, and you might end up with enough wine to fill a 6 gallon carboy that you eventually rack to a 5 gallon carboy. I'm thinking that 50 pounds of grapes will only be 2.5-3 gallons of wine once racked off the lees, which is hardly enough to store, rack, bottle etc.

The usual progression is that 100 pounds of grapes, yields 10 gallons of must, which yields 6 gallons of finished wine. These are rough but fairly consistent numbers. But regardless, keeping your container full is imperative to exclude oxygen. With carboys, you will rack down with some volume loss each time. It's heartbreaking at first, but totally expected and normal. Let me give a real world last week example. I pressed roughly 400+ pounds of Primitivo after fermentation which yielded 31 gallons of new wine. 2 days later, I racked off the lees and sludge to clean things up, yielding 27 gallons of wine. I'll likely rack 1 or 2 more times before bottling with additional small losses each time.

Family access to premium grapes is nice. Next year, try and get 300-350 pounds of each varietal. I have found this to be the sweet spot of home wine making. It's small enough to handle winery operations by yourself, and in the end will yield 6 cases of wine. This assures that 2-3 years later, you still have some left for giveaways and consumption.

 

[CDrew]

Since this is your first foray into winemaking I'd be inclined to leave things as they are, though keep an eye on that merlot pH/TA going forward. It (pH) may go up a bit after fermentation (and certainly after malolactic if you're doing that).

I could not agree more. Keep your first effort simple. Don't mess with the pH or TA. Make the wine, and see what you think.