RJ Spagnols Winery Series - Trio Red

Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum

Help Support Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Vinodawg

Junior
Joined
Oct 17, 2015
Messages
15
Reaction score
3
Starting this kit later today/tomorrow. Any recommendations on tweaking based on experiences of others with this kit? I may skip the Potassium Sorbate based on the other threads aimed at minimizing the risk of kit taste in dry red kits.
 
Vinodawg, I was not familiar with the Trio Red so I researched it. The wine is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and Zinfandel. Sounds really interesting.

If you are going to skip the Sorbate, be sure that you ferment the wine to dry, i.e. SG in the low 0.990's. I very rarely use Sorbate in my wines but I am sure to bulk age all of my reds for at least a year. As far as tweaking is concerned, I have frequently taken one of the background flavors of a wine and enhanced it. In your case, according to the literature, you should get "Aromas of vanilla, red berries and black cherries and sweet flavors of ripe raspberry, chocolate and cherry." If you are feeling adventurous, you might try enhancing one or two of these with fruit concentrates. If you don't feel you want to risk this, please refrain. I would hate to have you do something that caused your wine to be less than expected.

Good luck!
 
The instructions to this kit indicate that the wine is finished fermenting at SG at .998 or less, so I would assume that it is completely fermented at this point.
In most cases; I am willing to generally follow the kit manufacturer's instruction's when making a kit for the first time.
If the wine ferments to .998 or less, I would have no problem omitting the potassium sorbate, as it is added to prevent fermentation from restarting after the wine is bottled.
When I purchase a premium wine kit, I expect that it will produce a premium wine without tweaking, although you may decide that you can improve the results, but you need to have a baseline result in order to know for sure.
 
Which yeast comes with it? If EC-1118, consider a swap. Definitely bulk age for a year, and barrel age and allow at lest 6 months in bottle for best results
 
Vinodawg. Any updates? I'm picking this kit up tomorrow and I'm really hoping this one will turn out better than the last 5 kits I've done. I'm for sure leaving out sorbate this time but any other Recs would be great.
 
Stayed with EC-1118. Finished secondary today at .996. I skipped the sorbate. Will add oak and tannin during bulk aging.
 
Good deal. I switched the EC 1118 for Pasteur red, dropped in the medium toast oak powder in primary but held out the light toast powder (My kit came with 3 oak powder packs). I'm gonna use heavy Toasted American oak chips I purchased separately during secondary and like you, forego the sorbate. I'm hoping skipping the sorbate will end my wine kit woes and give me a robust red wine I can be proud of for once! Good luck and keep us posted.
 
Mine is about 16 months now and pretty good. I do not care for French oak myself. I really like it with medium plus american oak. It has a dark chocolate, sweet, deep jammy leather and tobacco, flavor that I really like the heavy American had strong bacon flavor to me...
 

Latest posts

Back
Top