LAgreeneyes
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 17, 2013
- Messages
- 345
- Reaction score
- 11
Why is it necessary to "clear" your wine? Does clearing affect the taste?
No, it is not necessary to clear wines, but they will self-clear in the bottle anyway. So the idea is to let them do as much of that as they can (or force them to do it) before bottling.
When I lived in Illinois, I knew a guy who made lots of great wine by straining it at the end of the ferment once stable and bottling right away. When he gave it away, he would tell people to set the bottle upright a day and not to drink the last inch (similar to what people do with a bottle-carbonated homebrew).
People are used to commercial wines that are super-filtered and processed, so they get squeamish if a wine is cloudy or has particulates or wine diamonds. Neither affects the quality of the wine. But clear and heat and cold stabilized are what we are used to in the store, so that is what many home winemakers do, to the extent of buying their own filtering systems.
Personally, I allow mine to settle out in aging and racking but I do not filter. I believe filtering does decrease flavor and color structure. The best blueberry wine I ever had came out of the bottom of a carboy. The dregs were allowed to settle in a wine bottle and a thick wine floated up. It had tons of flavor, all the heavier flavor elements that had settled out of the cleared blueberry wine by gravity.
Did this strawberry wine need clearing?
Opinions.
It was soooooooooooooo good too. Everyone who got a free bottle loved it. I made this wine before I joined this forum, so I didn't know anything about clearing.
To be honest, I kinda like the "cloudy" colorful look. But then again, I"m not a wine expert but I'm an expert when it comes to what I like taste. Always drinking a wine that has no color sounds boring to me but that's just my opinion. In my own deranged thinking, I would WANT the wine that I drink to look like whatever color fruit that it is. So, I would want my red grape wine to be red, watermelon to be red, etc. etc. etc. But that's just me.
Clearing a wine has little to do with making a wine with no color. All clearing is intended to do is get dead yeast, micro-bits of pulp and other solids to fall out of the wine.
And, YES, that needs cleared up. I'd bet you can taste the dead yeast from across the room.
I didn't taste any yeast. It was perfect for ME!
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