Tonight, I begin one of my more bold quests: the quest to make a half-decent port wine.
I must say, it is my guiltiest pleasure in the wine world to kick back a couple small glasses of port on a candle-lit, relaxed evening. There's just something about sipping on it's high-alcohol prune-y / raisin-y goodness while I'm enjoying a bowl of ice cream or bread pudding that just puts me in the mood for some Spanish poetry and some slow-strutting jazz. I mean, not literally, but just... mood-wise. You get the picture.
Port is traditionally made by crushing some grapes, adding some yeast, letting it ferment to around 5-6% ABV, and then -- and I love this part -- they keep the sugar from being completely eaten by the yeast by pouring brandy1 into the vat until there's so much alcohol, all the yeast die a quick-yet-painful death.
Yeah, that escalated quickly, now didn't it?
The result is a sweet-yet-strong potable that always pleases.
Now, unfortunately for me, it's not practical to take four gallons of 6% ABV wine and add ... (punches numbers into calculator) ... 2.24 gallons of brandy, so we're going to have to go about this a different way.
So, we're going to go hard or go home here and force-feed our yeast like a warehouse full of fois gras victims and make them produce as much alcohol as possible. This should be accomplished by not restoring our concentrate as much as they recommend (more sugar by volume), and then, once the yeast is done fermenting that sugar, we're gonna go ahead and pour a 1/4 gallon of simple syrup (i.e. drinkable sucrose) into the batch and just let it keep going to town.
Oh, and then we're going to do it again.
Luckily, the yeast I'm using is Lalvin EC-1118, which is a lovely strain of bacteria that has an alcohol tolerance of up to 18% (which is, actually, about our target ABV). So, let's get started! We've got...
- Reserve de Chateau Cabernet Merlot kit (includes concentrate, bentonite, Lalvin yeast, and a bunch of other stuff)
- 3 gallons of distilled water
- Sanitizing solution (I like the no-rinse iodine sanitizing solutions)
- A bucket and lid (fancy, I know)
- A stirring device (do I have to keep listing this stuff?)
So, we clean our stuff, sanitize our stirring device and bucket, and get to work. Start by pouring our concentrate into the bucket, setting aside about 1 and 1/2 cups of concentrate for later use. Put that 1.5c of concentrate into a little baggy, and stow that in the freezer for a later date.
Pour some distilled water into your concentrate pouch and slosh it around to pick up all of that sweet, sweet concentrate that you just paid forty bones for, and add that to the bucket.
Pour some distilled water into your concentrate pouch and slosh it around to pick up all of that sweet, sweet concentrate that you just paid forty bones for, and add that to the bucket.
Now, restore2 your concentrate in the bucket up to 4 gallons. Take some of that bentonite and toss that into your mix. This will provide "nucleation sites" throughout your wine to help your fermentation get started[citation needed] (oh wait, here's a citation, kinda).
Now, let's have a look at our specific gravity. This basically measures the density of our liquid. No, not liquid. Let's act like professionals here and call it must. There, that's more like it. Specific gravity tells us the density of our must, which helps us later determine the amount of alcohol in our wine. You measure the density of your wine now, measure it later, and the density that is lost must be due to the fermentation. You throw into the mix a calculator and some science, and you end up with the %ABV.
Now, your typical initial wine gravity will be around 1.080-1.090 g/mL, and here, we have ... (reads hydrometer)... Holy Schnikes, 1.124 g/mL. That's some thick must. But, that's what we're going for. Hopefully, it can reach ~16% ABV on its own before I add more sugar.
Well, now just sprinkle that yeast on top, let it soak in for 10 minutes, and then stir it in real good. Once it's done, slap a lid on it and fit it with an airlock. An airlock is simply a little piece of plastic, filled with sanitized fluid that lets gas from our fermenting wine out, while not any nasty, dirty, dusty air in.
And now, the easiest part of making wine (and the hardest) -- we wait! We'll revisit this wine in a couple weeks. Let the port find itself swiftly onto my rack!
UPDATE (6/30/13): S.G. was 1.034 g/mL, which means that the slurry of grape and yeast is at about 11.8% ABV. (I use an ABV calculator, but I'll dig deeper into the calculation in a later post)
For bookkeeping, that's about 4.2 gal * 0.118 ABV = 0.5 gal alcohol. This will be important later.
I'm aiming for around 17% ABV (with it still having sweetness left), so at this point, I want to add some sugar to it to keep it chugging away.
I draw away about 6 cups of the must and dump about 3lb of powdered corn sugar into it and dissolve it all. Once it's nice and dissolved, you take your new sweet-tooth-slurry and dump it back in the bucket.
The new S.G. is about 1.058 g/mL. I'll be gone for another couple of days, so we'll see where it's at when I get back.
1 Well, the professionals have this fancy 140-proof distilled wine-alcohol (hard to call it Brandy at that point). Much cheaper.
2 This means "add water". I'm not going to explain that one again :-P.
Credit: Inspiration for this endeavor from an Amazon review for this kit: here
Now, let's have a look at our specific gravity. This basically measures the density of our liquid. No, not liquid. Let's act like professionals here and call it must. There, that's more like it. Specific gravity tells us the density of our must, which helps us later determine the amount of alcohol in our wine. You measure the density of your wine now, measure it later, and the density that is lost must be due to the fermentation. You throw into the mix a calculator and some science, and you end up with the %ABV.
Now, your typical initial wine gravity will be around 1.080-1.090 g/mL, and here, we have ... (reads hydrometer)... Holy Schnikes, 1.124 g/mL. That's some thick must. But, that's what we're going for. Hopefully, it can reach ~16% ABV on its own before I add more sugar.
Well, now just sprinkle that yeast on top, let it soak in for 10 minutes, and then stir it in real good. Once it's done, slap a lid on it and fit it with an airlock. An airlock is simply a little piece of plastic, filled with sanitized fluid that lets gas from our fermenting wine out, while not any nasty, dirty, dusty air in.
And now, the easiest part of making wine (and the hardest) -- we wait! We'll revisit this wine in a couple weeks. Let the port find itself swiftly onto my rack!
UPDATE (6/30/13): S.G. was 1.034 g/mL, which means that the slurry of grape and yeast is at about 11.8% ABV. (I use an ABV calculator, but I'll dig deeper into the calculation in a later post)
For bookkeeping, that's about 4.2 gal * 0.118 ABV = 0.5 gal alcohol. This will be important later.
I'm aiming for around 17% ABV (with it still having sweetness left), so at this point, I want to add some sugar to it to keep it chugging away.
I draw away about 6 cups of the must and dump about 3lb of powdered corn sugar into it and dissolve it all. Once it's nice and dissolved, you take your new sweet-tooth-slurry and dump it back in the bucket.
The new S.G. is about 1.058 g/mL. I'll be gone for another couple of days, so we'll see where it's at when I get back.
1 Well, the professionals have this fancy 140-proof distilled wine-alcohol (hard to call it Brandy at that point). Much cheaper.
2 This means "add water". I'm not going to explain that one again :-P.
Credit: Inspiration for this endeavor from an Amazon review for this kit: here
