RJ Spagnols Rj Spagnols Australian Shiraz
- Thread starter Waldo
- Start date
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Added the starter to it thsi morning Hippie. Used my stirrer until the battery ran down hehehe and then added the starter. Will see what happens now. Will give it a couple of days and chek the sg. Wish I had checked it again before I added the starter
LMAO! YeeeHawww! Atta way Waldo! Hopefully that good ole EC-1118 will ferment that stuff all the way to dryness and you will have some good wine in a few months. I love a good success story. With all the bad news coming from the gulf and bad going to worse in New Orleans, it is good to hear something right happening, no matter how small.
Poor ole Waldo was feeling mighty blue
With his Australian Shiraz he was just about through
The SG readings were always too high
And his hopes of having a good wine
Seemed like "Pie In The Sky"
He had nurtured and cared for it right from the start
But it seemed doomed from the beginning
And the yeast would never start.
Then out of the forum a voice rang clear.
Keep the faith Waldo, "Hippie" is Here
Heed my instructions and your wine will go far
You must make you a starter in quart fruit jar.
Usea cup of water and little of the wine.
Then a pinchof nutrient and energizer and all will be fine.
Now sprinkle in a packet of Lalvin EC-1118 yeast.
I assure you that you have now created a "sugar beast"
Add a little more wine as the foaming begins
Soon and very soon your "Shiraz" will be on the mend.
When that quart jar is about full of the foaming starter
I want ya to stir that wine hard then stir it even harder.
Now add the foamingstarter to your wine
Soon and very soon your fermnting will be fine.
I did as Hippiesaid , followed his instruction to a "T"
Andsoon the bubbling in the airlock blew the cap free.
It is chugging right along, the fermentation is going fine
Thanks to Hippie, I'm gonna have somemighty finewine.
Edited by: Waldo
With his Australian Shiraz he was just about through
The SG readings were always too high
And his hopes of having a good wine
Seemed like "Pie In The Sky"
He had nurtured and cared for it right from the start
But it seemed doomed from the beginning
And the yeast would never start.
Then out of the forum a voice rang clear.
Keep the faith Waldo, "Hippie" is Here
Heed my instructions and your wine will go far
You must make you a starter in quart fruit jar.
Usea cup of water and little of the wine.
Then a pinchof nutrient and energizer and all will be fine.
Now sprinkle in a packet of Lalvin EC-1118 yeast.
I assure you that you have now created a "sugar beast"
Add a little more wine as the foaming begins
Soon and very soon your "Shiraz" will be on the mend.
When that quart jar is about full of the foaming starter
I want ya to stir that wine hard then stir it even harder.
Now add the foamingstarter to your wine
Soon and very soon your fermnting will be fine.
I did as Hippiesaid , followed his instruction to a "T"
Andsoon the bubbling in the airlock blew the cap free.
It is chugging right along, the fermentation is going fine
Thanks to Hippie, I'm gonna have somemighty finewine.
Edited by: Waldo
Not sure what is going on here Hippie but I added the Sorbate and fining to the kit this morning at an SG of .980 and using my whizzer I began stirring it good and it erupted like Mt St. Helens. I never seen so much foaming. I kept stirring and eventually it dissipated. A lot of the funky smell remains but it has a really deep rich color to t.
Sounds like you have degassed it well...time to top it off well and let it settle for at least 2 weeks. The only action should be a gentle rocking of carboy if fines appear to beholding up on the sides.
Don't rush into bottling.....let the finings do their work...a gentle rocking and maybe a nice poem only!
Tim Vandergrift's professional advice on degassing:
Just a quick redux of the stirring issue for my (Winexpert) kits:
<UL>
<LI>If you've fermented at the right starting volume, the right temperature, and you've achieved the recommended specific gravity levels, then you'll be able to stir the wine to de-gas within the time-frames specified in the instructions.
<LI>If the wine was started at anything other than the full 6 US-gallons (23 litres) or it was fermented cooler than 68 F, or if your gravity readings were not at or below the recommended levels when you did the process, you will not experience consistent success.
<LI>You only need to stir a Winexpert kit four times.
<UL>
<LI>On day one, you have to beat the snot out of the must to mix it properly. A good, arm-cracking one minute stir to froth it up and mix the juice and water will get you off to a good start and a thorough fermentation
<LI>On fining/stabilising day, after you've double-checked the SG, then you can first stir the kit without adding anything--and without racking it off the sediment! (Unless it's a Crushendo kit, but that's covered in the instructions--no racking for any other kit. If you choose to rack it, you will not experience consistent results. This first stirring will be to greatly de-gas the wine, prior to adding any of the fining agents or stablisers. Beat the hell out of it, for one full minute. Use a watch or clock--one minute is a lot longer than most people think. If you can scractch your head with your stirring hand after that one minute, you haven't stirred hard enough. It should be an all-out blizzard of effort that costs you all of your strength, and you should see spots in front of your eyes (see why I tell people to buy a drill-mounted stirring whip?)
<LI>Add the sorbate and the sulphite, and stir again, for one full minute. This time you may break one or two small bones in your stirring arm, but don't slow down--if anything, stir harder.
<LI>Add the fining agent and the F-Pack (if the kit has one) and stir for one more full minute. Have the paramedics standing by with a bag of ice to carry your stirring arm to the hospital where it can be re-attached. Top up with water and call it a day.
</LI>[/list]</LI>[/list]
Now, if you have fizzy wine after this regimen, you don't have a stirring issue. You have eiither got an incomplete or ongoing fermentation, or you're mistaking foam for fizz, or you may have an inicipient lactic acid bacterial infection that is making a bit of CO2 in the wine.
The amount of stirring described will reduce SO2 slightly in the kit: however, the amount it is reduced by is minimal, because rather than uptaking oxygen during this process, the wine out-gasses CO2, which actually scrubs some of the oxygen out of the wine.
If you stir at a time when the wine is not saturated with CO2, you may experience reduced SO2 and potentially expose the wine to oxidation. But then, why are you stirring wine if it's not fizzy?
Hope this helps outl
Tim Vandergrift
Technical Services Manager, Winexpert Limited.
Don't rush into bottling.....let the finings do their work...a gentle rocking and maybe a nice poem only!
Tim Vandergrift's professional advice on degassing:
Just a quick redux of the stirring issue for my (Winexpert) kits:
<UL>
<LI>If you've fermented at the right starting volume, the right temperature, and you've achieved the recommended specific gravity levels, then you'll be able to stir the wine to de-gas within the time-frames specified in the instructions.
<LI>If the wine was started at anything other than the full 6 US-gallons (23 litres) or it was fermented cooler than 68 F, or if your gravity readings were not at or below the recommended levels when you did the process, you will not experience consistent success.
<LI>You only need to stir a Winexpert kit four times.
<UL>
<LI>On day one, you have to beat the snot out of the must to mix it properly. A good, arm-cracking one minute stir to froth it up and mix the juice and water will get you off to a good start and a thorough fermentation
<LI>On fining/stabilising day, after you've double-checked the SG, then you can first stir the kit without adding anything--and without racking it off the sediment! (Unless it's a Crushendo kit, but that's covered in the instructions--no racking for any other kit. If you choose to rack it, you will not experience consistent results. This first stirring will be to greatly de-gas the wine, prior to adding any of the fining agents or stablisers. Beat the hell out of it, for one full minute. Use a watch or clock--one minute is a lot longer than most people think. If you can scractch your head with your stirring hand after that one minute, you haven't stirred hard enough. It should be an all-out blizzard of effort that costs you all of your strength, and you should see spots in front of your eyes (see why I tell people to buy a drill-mounted stirring whip?)
<LI>Add the sorbate and the sulphite, and stir again, for one full minute. This time you may break one or two small bones in your stirring arm, but don't slow down--if anything, stir harder.
<LI>Add the fining agent and the F-Pack (if the kit has one) and stir for one more full minute. Have the paramedics standing by with a bag of ice to carry your stirring arm to the hospital where it can be re-attached. Top up with water and call it a day.
</LI>[/list]</LI>[/list]
Now, if you have fizzy wine after this regimen, you don't have a stirring issue. You have eiither got an incomplete or ongoing fermentation, or you're mistaking foam for fizz, or you may have an inicipient lactic acid bacterial infection that is making a bit of CO2 in the wine.
The amount of stirring described will reduce SO2 slightly in the kit: however, the amount it is reduced by is minimal, because rather than uptaking oxygen during this process, the wine out-gasses CO2, which actually scrubs some of the oxygen out of the wine.
If you stir at a time when the wine is not saturated with CO2, you may experience reduced SO2 and potentially expose the wine to oxidation. But then, why are you stirring wine if it's not fizzy?
Hope this helps outl
Tim Vandergrift
Technical Services Manager, Winexpert Limited.
Found this nifty little article on Shiraz and thought others may enjoy it while we all await the outcome of my kit.
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<TD>Australia has Bondi Beach, the Red Centre, Paul Hogan, silly Ken Done postcards, Kylie Minogue and shiraz. It's the most planted, most approachable, most expensive and the most famous wine in Australia. But it's also a whole lot more, as Campbell Mattinson explains.
It's the blackest, the boldest, the baddest, the ripest, the sweetest, the sexiest, the Grangest; it is the beast of grapes that we call shiraz. If it were a movie star it'd perennially play the role of a gladiator -- and barely interrupt the seduction as it casually brutalised lions. It builds muscular wines that are pumped up yet graceful and when at their best ripple and bulge and glisten and sing with flavour. Naturally, it can be brash. Uncompromising. Highly alcoholic. Taut. And aggressive in its thrusting, pungent, spicy, plummy, jammy, powerful attack on your tongue, your lips, your mouth, your face, your everything. In its youth it can be wild and raw and deep and sulky and luscious and urgent all at once. Yet with age and time and persistence it can be velvety and supple and like a crooning Connick Jnr-esque romantic; it is a black-fruited beast that can be tamed. It rocks as a crazy one night sore-in-the-morning stand. But also as a life partner. It originated in Europe and under the name syrah in France's Rhone Valley is still used to make the rich wines of Hermitage and the aromatic wines of the Cote Rotie. It is many things. Young and old. But in hot, brash, take-no-crap Australia, it is shiraz. It is our premier and most-planted grape. And if any grape can this is the one which defines us, as a nation, in a bottle.
And it is on a roll.
As a cheap, flavoursome quaffer. As a mid-priced power-packed beauty. As a heady sparkler. As a hot climate monster. Or as a cool climate flash of elegance and spicy style. However you like it, shiraz is slaying them.
Whenever you hear tales of Aussie wines fetching ludicrous prices at auction in Australia or the United States (and you do, frighteningly often), the wine in question is always a shiraz. Always. Penfolds Grange. Henschke Hill of Grace. Clarendon Hills Astralis. Dalwhinnie The Eagle. Fox Creek Reserve. Brokenwood Graveyard. Jasper Hill Georgia's and Emily's Paddock. Rockford Basket Press. Turkey Flat - they are all shiraz (or shiraz dominated) and they're all brilliantly made pillars of Australian wine.
And the world knows it.
Which makes it the investor's wine.
And the drinker's wine too.
Because whatever you pay for shiraz, $10 or $100, you're entitled to a ripper.
AND THE TASTE?
Shiraz's secret, pure and plain, is its generosity of warm flavour, and its ability to thrive in a wide range of climates. Like a splash of hot gossip, it can also be deceptively easy to consume, the easiest of the big red wines to drink when young. Typically, it is characterised by plums and blackberry-like fruit flavour, and in warmer areas often adds a lick of chocolate-like flavour to the mix. Or mint, cloves, even eucalypt - depending on whether it's from the Clare Valley, Heathcote, or the Pyrenees. In cooler areas you find a kind of savoury, spicy black cherry and raspberry-like flavour oozing through.
To both styles, in Australia we usually add oak, which teases it up with sexily sweet vanilla or coconut or even caramel, to give it an irresistible savoury sweetness.
EAT IT WITH
For such rich flavours, it usually goes best with meat dishes -- though good warm savoury Coonawarra shiraz (think Wynns, Bowen, Redman) with capsicum and eggplant and juicy olive pizza is a stand-up gem.
But really shiraz is at its best with BBQed meats. Steaks, tasty salty sausages, tomato and basil with strips of crispy bacon, aged angus beef brimming with mushroom and red wine sauce, gamey pan-stewed kangaroo. Or with mid-winter beef burgundy and loads of fresh crunchy bread and strong cheeses to finish -- right there, an opulent shiraz is your weapon.
Think comfort foods, around the barbie or in front of the teev, in front of the open fire -- and think Australian shiraz wrapping its big strong arms around you and making you feel safe (or drunk: Oz shiraz is also notoriously high in alcohol, at times pushing 16 percent).
HOT SPOTS
And as a country, we are embarrassingly endowed with the stuff. Just about every one of our major wine regions (barring Tasmania, which is just too cool) produces terrific, regionally-expressive versions -- and while generally not terribly suited to cool climate areas, on selected sites you even get the odd boomer there in great years: Paringa Estate and Port Phillip Estate on the Mornington Peninsula, Seville Estate and De Bortoli in the Yarra Valley, Clonakilla in the Canberra area, Bannockburn near Geelong, Best's and Great Western in, err, Great Western being the most notable.
Far more reliable though are the warmer areas: Heathcote/Bendigo in Victoria (Jasper Hill, Hanging Rock Heathcote, Balgownie); the Barossa (Rockford, Charles Melton, Peter Lehmann, Henschke, Turkey Flat, Glaetzer, Grant Burge, Langmeil, Charles Cimicky, and many others); McLaren Vale (Hardy's Tintara, Kays, Chapel Hill, Tatachilla, Rosemount, many others); the Hunter Valley (Tyrrell's, McWilliams); Western Australia (Plantagenet, Cape Mentelle, Evans and Tate); and the Clare Valley (Tim Adams, Leasingham).
Think a custom-built V8 Beamer baked in the deepest black-purple hue -- and you're thinking of shiraz. You can try, but in the end it's simply impossible not to succumb.
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<TD>s h i r a z </TD></TR></T></TABLE>
<TABLE cellPadding=5 width="75%">
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<TD>Australia has Bondi Beach, the Red Centre, Paul Hogan, silly Ken Done postcards, Kylie Minogue and shiraz. It's the most planted, most approachable, most expensive and the most famous wine in Australia. But it's also a whole lot more, as Campbell Mattinson explains.
It's the blackest, the boldest, the baddest, the ripest, the sweetest, the sexiest, the Grangest; it is the beast of grapes that we call shiraz. If it were a movie star it'd perennially play the role of a gladiator -- and barely interrupt the seduction as it casually brutalised lions. It builds muscular wines that are pumped up yet graceful and when at their best ripple and bulge and glisten and sing with flavour. Naturally, it can be brash. Uncompromising. Highly alcoholic. Taut. And aggressive in its thrusting, pungent, spicy, plummy, jammy, powerful attack on your tongue, your lips, your mouth, your face, your everything. In its youth it can be wild and raw and deep and sulky and luscious and urgent all at once. Yet with age and time and persistence it can be velvety and supple and like a crooning Connick Jnr-esque romantic; it is a black-fruited beast that can be tamed. It rocks as a crazy one night sore-in-the-morning stand. But also as a life partner. It originated in Europe and under the name syrah in France's Rhone Valley is still used to make the rich wines of Hermitage and the aromatic wines of the Cote Rotie. It is many things. Young and old. But in hot, brash, take-no-crap Australia, it is shiraz. It is our premier and most-planted grape. And if any grape can this is the one which defines us, as a nation, in a bottle.
And it is on a roll.
As a cheap, flavoursome quaffer. As a mid-priced power-packed beauty. As a heady sparkler. As a hot climate monster. Or as a cool climate flash of elegance and spicy style. However you like it, shiraz is slaying them.
Whenever you hear tales of Aussie wines fetching ludicrous prices at auction in Australia or the United States (and you do, frighteningly often), the wine in question is always a shiraz. Always. Penfolds Grange. Henschke Hill of Grace. Clarendon Hills Astralis. Dalwhinnie The Eagle. Fox Creek Reserve. Brokenwood Graveyard. Jasper Hill Georgia's and Emily's Paddock. Rockford Basket Press. Turkey Flat - they are all shiraz (or shiraz dominated) and they're all brilliantly made pillars of Australian wine.
And the world knows it.
Which makes it the investor's wine.
And the drinker's wine too.
Because whatever you pay for shiraz, $10 or $100, you're entitled to a ripper.
AND THE TASTE?
Shiraz's secret, pure and plain, is its generosity of warm flavour, and its ability to thrive in a wide range of climates. Like a splash of hot gossip, it can also be deceptively easy to consume, the easiest of the big red wines to drink when young. Typically, it is characterised by plums and blackberry-like fruit flavour, and in warmer areas often adds a lick of chocolate-like flavour to the mix. Or mint, cloves, even eucalypt - depending on whether it's from the Clare Valley, Heathcote, or the Pyrenees. In cooler areas you find a kind of savoury, spicy black cherry and raspberry-like flavour oozing through.
To both styles, in Australia we usually add oak, which teases it up with sexily sweet vanilla or coconut or even caramel, to give it an irresistible savoury sweetness.
EAT IT WITH
For such rich flavours, it usually goes best with meat dishes -- though good warm savoury Coonawarra shiraz (think Wynns, Bowen, Redman) with capsicum and eggplant and juicy olive pizza is a stand-up gem.
But really shiraz is at its best with BBQed meats. Steaks, tasty salty sausages, tomato and basil with strips of crispy bacon, aged angus beef brimming with mushroom and red wine sauce, gamey pan-stewed kangaroo. Or with mid-winter beef burgundy and loads of fresh crunchy bread and strong cheeses to finish -- right there, an opulent shiraz is your weapon.
Think comfort foods, around the barbie or in front of the teev, in front of the open fire -- and think Australian shiraz wrapping its big strong arms around you and making you feel safe (or drunk: Oz shiraz is also notoriously high in alcohol, at times pushing 16 percent).
HOT SPOTS
And as a country, we are embarrassingly endowed with the stuff. Just about every one of our major wine regions (barring Tasmania, which is just too cool) produces terrific, regionally-expressive versions -- and while generally not terribly suited to cool climate areas, on selected sites you even get the odd boomer there in great years: Paringa Estate and Port Phillip Estate on the Mornington Peninsula, Seville Estate and De Bortoli in the Yarra Valley, Clonakilla in the Canberra area, Bannockburn near Geelong, Best's and Great Western in, err, Great Western being the most notable.
Far more reliable though are the warmer areas: Heathcote/Bendigo in Victoria (Jasper Hill, Hanging Rock Heathcote, Balgownie); the Barossa (Rockford, Charles Melton, Peter Lehmann, Henschke, Turkey Flat, Glaetzer, Grant Burge, Langmeil, Charles Cimicky, and many others); McLaren Vale (Hardy's Tintara, Kays, Chapel Hill, Tatachilla, Rosemount, many others); the Hunter Valley (Tyrrell's, McWilliams); Western Australia (Plantagenet, Cape Mentelle, Evans and Tate); and the Clare Valley (Tim Adams, Leasingham).
Think a custom-built V8 Beamer baked in the deepest black-purple hue -- and you're thinking of shiraz. You can try, but in the end it's simply impossible not to succumb.
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