Red wine has vinegar smell.

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tucson

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Red kit, followed directions, I have done 10 kits in the past. Open a bottle and a vinegar smell hits your nose. Stayed in CB for 6 weeks to mature. Can this be put back into CB and if so how to eliminate vinegar smell?
 
Might want to risk opening another bottle to confirm the whole batch may be bad. What wine, and what #'s. IMHO 6 weeks is not really much time to mature. How about decanting that bottle and see if there's any change. Worse comes to worse you have a lot of wine-vinegar for cooking/salad dressing. Don't think there's any comeback from vinegar..
 
Just read a article tonite in Wime Making Mag that said that if it smells like vinegar to "Chunk it" and don't use it on anything, "Chunk" the vinegar also, no cure for it. If the vinegar isn't too strong and you can stand the taste to drink it fast, otherwise "Chunk" it.
Semper Fi
 
The real issue is, are you really smelling vinegar. Sometimes people mistake acetaldehyde for vinegar. Before throwing the wine out, why not try an experiment, dissolve 4.5 grams sulfite in 120ml of water, pull a cork on a bottle and add 1 ml of solution and re-cork, invert the bottle several times to mix and allow to sit for several days or longer and then taste. This will add maybe 24 ppm sulfite to the wine, if the odor is gone then acetaldehyde may have been the issue. Understand that the wine is not going to necessarily taste good at this point, it may taste bottle sick, but you're just checking to see if additional sulfite eliminates the odor. If it works, I would do it to the other bottles and allow them to age a few months and start tasting one every few months, this is where the fun begins.
 
Stickman, I'll give it a try. The mouth after taste is very good just the nose that smells the vinegar.
 

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