My wine went pink!

[thefogonthetyne]

Hi,
I am just moving my wine to the second bucket for secondary fermentation and it is most definitely light pink, not red.

The end was made from my own grapes.

I have used a red wine yeast.

Done all the usual stuff.

Any ideas what causes it to go pink?

 

[Johnd]

Hard to say, what do you mean by "Done all the usual stuff"? Wine gets its color from the skins, what kind of grapes are you using? How long did you cold soak before fermenting? How long did you leave the skins and pulp in with the fermenting wine? Did you use any type of extraction enzyme like Lallzyme EX-V or a product like Opti-Red? So many things can affect the color of the wine, the absence of enough tannin can result in the color not binding in the wine and dropping out during fermentation. If you could give us some more insight into your process from the beginning to now, we may be able to help more..............

 

[thefogonthetyne]

Heh goodness, seems like the simple answer is: I don’t know what I am doing :-D

I followed these instructions, with one change: because I had only a couple of bowls of grapes (my vine in our garden is only a few years old) it procured maybe a quarter of a gallon. So I added water to bring it to a gallon - as I type this inrealise that this is probably the reason :-( I am so sad, this was the first harvest worth collecting and I balsed it up :-/

Instructions here: http://www.the-gift-of-wine.com/how to make grape wine.html

(I used every they suggested)

Btw, I unfortunately no idea what my vine is. All I know is the grapes a.m. we’re round and red and small, the size of peas. They were definitely grapes I tasted them and they were seeet with a very strong sweet/bitter taste - in a nice way.

 

[Johnd]

Heh goodness, seems like the simple answer is: I don’t know what I am doing :-D

I followed these instructions, with one change: because I had only a couple of bowls of grapes (my vine in our garden is only a few years old) it procured maybe a quarter of a gallon. So I added water to bring it to a gallon - as I type this inrealise that this is probably the reason :-( I am so sad, this was the first harvest worth collecting and I balsed it up :-/

Instructions here: http://www.the-gift-of-wine.com/how to make grape wine.html

(I used every they suggested)

Btw, I unfortunately no idea what my vine is. All I know is the grapes a.m. we’re round and red and small, the size of peas. They were definitely grapes I tasted them and they were seeet with a very strong sweet/bitter taste - in a nice way.

Red wine from grapes is typically made from just the crushed grapes, skins, and pulp, with no water added in most cases, fermented together until the sugar is nearly all converted to alcohol. Sometimes when the sugar content is too high, a bit of water is added to bring the sugar content (and ultimately the alcohol) down.

The added water in your case probably just served to lighten the color as well as lowering the sugar content, body, and flavor.

 

[thefogonthetyne]

Thanks, when I added the water I kinda knew I was probably making a mistake. There was so little juice from so few grapes, I don’t think I even had a bottle of wine!! Ah well, a lesson learnt and I’ll see what this pink stuff turns into! Thanks for your help. I don’t suppose there is anything I can add to make it red, a cheat?

 

[meadmaker1]

Perhaps a can of grape juice concentrate.
100%grape read labels.

 

[thefogonthetyne]

Thanks that could just save it cheers

 

[angus padius]

Hi,
I am just moving my wine to the second bucket for secondary fermentation and it is most definitely light pink, not red.

The end was made from my own grapes.

I have used a red wine yeast.

Done all the usual stuff.

Any ideas what causes it to go pink?

Maybe you took the peel off too early.

 

[Dave Dierking]

It takes about 16lbs of grapes to make a Gallon of wine. I did 60 lbs of Zinfandel grapes from my vines and have about 4.5 gallons after pressing in Malolactic fermentation right now and am expecting to finish with ~ 3.75 gallons to bottle after all the racking is done.

Adding water can change the color from Red to Rose to "Clear" depending on how much is added. Am assuming you added sugar to compensate for the water addition to get Initial Specific Gravity up to 1.094 or there about.