Need some suggestions

[Dylusia]

Awhile back I bought a really cheap Prestige wine kit (white Zinfandel) I thought it would actually be white but it's a blush color. I really don't drink much wine and was pretty much going into all this blind so forgive me if any questions are off the wall

To make a long story short, I followed the instructions, degassed and darn near wore my arm out doing it, added the clarifier on Nov 29. It looks pretty clear so far and has gunk on the bottom of the carboy. I tasted it today.. it's pretty strong, I figured it out to be approx 12.95% alcohol.

I would like to give it some flavor, the kit came with wine conditioner but I'm wondering if it is possible to give it some raspberry flavor and sweeten it up a bit so it's not so harsh.

I'm guessing that my best move would be to rack it to get rid of the gunk on the bottom. But then I'm just not sure how to go about making it more easy to drink. Can I add raspberry frozen concentrate juice? Would I just let it warm up to room temperature and dump it in? Is there anything else I would need to add?

Sorry, but I really am not sure how to proceed from here, the instructions in the wine kit just say 'Make sure you taste your wine. You have the choice now to adjust the sweetness by adding wine sweetener'.

Also, the wine is currently in a 23L Carboy.

If anyone has any suggestions they'd be much appreciated.

 

[xoltri]

Rack it off the sediment then add the wine conditioner that it came with. You can then taste it and if it's not sweet enough for you you can add just table sugar to sweeten more. I did this with the white zinfandel I made also. Be careful because if you add to much you can't get it back out, and I'm told it will taste a bit sweeter in a few months than it did when you added the sugar for whatever reason.

As far as it tasting harsh, that's how most young wines taste. You are probably tasting a lot of sulfites mostly. I wouldn't judge the wine until 2 or 3 months in the bottle at least. All you can do now is adjust the sweetness to your liking, bottle it and forget about it for a couple months.

 

[malweth]

Zinfandel is a red grape. White zin is (or was originally) made by removing some of the juice from a red zin batch before the skins were removed (resulting in a darker red zin) ... thus the pink color. While white zin is sweet, it wasn't always a sweet wine and was originally the result of a stuck fermentation.

 

[Brian]

I would like to give it some flavor, the kit came with wine conditioner but I'm wondering if it is possible to give it some raspberry flavor and sweeten it up a bit so it's not so harsh.

Well a couple of things do you have a hydrometer and if so what is the current reading? Like xoltri said don't sweeten it to much because it will get sweeter with some time most young wines are harsh tasting. You can sweeten your wine with somthing other than the packet that came with the wine but my advice with kits is to follow the instructions. (Just my opinion) But if you want to sweeten it with somthing with flavor you can use juice or syrup of your choice.

Please let us know what you do and how it turns out.

 

[Dylusia]

The hydrometer reading on it is .996. It was only after I started this kit that I discovered they made mist kits From now on, that's probably what I'll be making.

 

[xoltri]

My wife likes the mist kits too. I purchased the Grand Cru Zinfandel Blush kit I made thinking it was an off dry rose wine but it turned out that there was no F-pack...it was a dry rose wine. So in my case I took out two samples, sweetened each one differently and then let my wife taste them to see which one she liked better.

When I found out what sweetness she liked I used my refractometer to get a brix reading of the small sample, then added sugar to the whole batch to match that brix reading.

That's the way I did it in detail. I learned that 1 cup of sugar will raise 6 gallons 1 full brix, which is helpful to know.

 

[Wade E]

If you plan on using the raspberry concentrate then dont use the wine conditioner or you will probably end up with a wine that is too sweet. The raspberry concentrate will work fine and Ive used similiar methods on a few wines in the past like this. If after using the concentrate you find its not sweet enough then proceed ith the conditioner.

 

[Dylusia]

Thank you all so much for your input, I feel much better about going ahead with this now. I'll let you know what I do and how it turns out.

 

[xoltri]

Good luck! Also I wanted to mention, don't waste money on the 'wine conditioner' you can buy at your LHBS. Sugar is way cheaper, and it doesn't really take that much stirring to get it to dissolve.

 

[Wade E]

The wine conditioner comes with some of these kits.

 

[xoltri]

Yeah I'm talking about the small bottles of stuff you can buy separate. I paid about $5 for 500ml of wine conditioner. Probably equivalent to $0.20 worth of table sugar.

 

[Dylusia]

This didn't go over so well I bottled 12 bottles from the carboy without back sweetening as I figured over time, perhaps when they age some, they will be much better. To the remaining wine, I added one container of the thawed out raspberry concentrate and bottled that as well. This morning, I noticed a little sediment forming in all of the ones that had the raspberry concentrate added, the others without it are fine, no sediment. I wasn't too sure what to do, I uncorked all the raspberry bottles and poured them back into the sterilized carboy trying not to splash any of it too much. Newbie mistake I guess? As the carboy is no longer full, I'm thinking maybe I'll have to pick up a 3g carboy and leave that wine to sit for a bit. Am I on the right track?