Improving Wine from a Cheap Wine Kit

[Music] hey guys I want to talk about a little project I've been working on over the last about four months and it was to take the cheapest possible kit wine that I could buy and try to make a full-bodied red wine with some complex flavors out of it and the kit that I started with was called a wine lovers Merlot you can get those on Amazon I think they're about $40 now but at the time I bought it it was about $30 so maybe watch to those be on sale and the kit only contains five point two liters of concentrate which is really really low to make six gallons of wine so that alone makes it really challenging to make it full-body so the very first thing I did was instead of making six gallons I only added enough water to make five gallons and what that does is it just kind of adds a little bit more body and thickens everything up but it also increases the acidity which I had to address and I'll I'll touch on that a little bit later so once I've got my my five gallons of water stirred the heck out of it you really got to stir those kids up like crazy I also decided to add some other ingredients because these kits are going to be really low ten and just really cop thin wines that's a really cheap kits so I added six point six ounces of grapes ten stems so that will give you some green tannin and the stems I took we're just from some like Thompson's seedless grapes the green grapes you get in the store I'm so add that right into the bucket that I fermented in I also added one ounce of toasted America you know right to the primary fermentation to give it a little bit again a little bit more cannon I'm a little bit more oak because of course this without zero oak right from the kit and then the wild-card thing I did which is a little bit unheard of is I took three sliced our three young sweet mini mini peppers they're called there's a little orange peppers you get at the store I threw this up into little slices and let the stems let the seeds and do that right into the primary fermentation and the reason I did that is because with these Reds like the Bordeaux variety Reds they generally contain something called pyrazine and that is it that out bell pepper aroma and a lot of people don't like that and a lot of winemakers will try everything they do to avoid that but personally I kind of like that so it was something I was trying to shoot for on this wine so I sliced those peppers and put it in the primary fermentation and on day one 24 hours I pulled all the one slice of one like you know half inch long slice of pepper out because the the pepper aroma was really coming on pretty strong of course I stirred it every day for a week as the primary fermentation was going on oh forgot to mention oxidated with lava nice e-111 eight which is the yeast that came with the kit I pumped up my fermentation temp with a little seed heater to about 75 between 75 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit which again just two cops uh call if all the flavor and small doubt up between the oak and the pepper and then I after a week when I went completely dry wrapped it into a five-gallon carboy and made sure it was topped up to the very neck and at a quarter teaspoon of potassium metabisulfite so right from the very start I can say the first month of this one it was really you could really kind of smell the pepper tannins were coming on pretty strong which is exactly kind of what you want in a young wine those strong cannons and now four months later everything has completely smoothed out on those tant's pulverized and it's really got a decent mouthfeel it's got a full-bodied flavor and it's really quite a good wine but the thing I really had to do I mean it would be totally different had I not done this was I had to reduce the acidity in this wine and the way I chose to do that was a blend of calcium carbonate and potassium bicarbonate both of which are easy to find at your brew shop or even online you can get calcium carbonate or potassium bicarbonate powder and I chose to use a blend because um if I use too much of either one of those I could start to get either a potassium taste or calcium taste in my wine so the blend seemed to work out pretty good so I ended up using about 10 grams of calcium carbonate and 20 grams of potassium bicarbonate be careful with the calcium carbonate it makes a bubble so add it real slowly or you could you know volcano your wine and the potassium bicarbonate you do have to cold stabilize so I will put this in the fridge just to drop any unstable tartrates out before I do bottle this and as a rule of thumb with both of those two and a half grams per gallon of wine of calcium carbonate will raise your pH by 0.1 and three point eight grams per gallon of potassium bicarbonate will do the same thing and always kind of err on the side of caution with that because you don't want to overshoot your number um but again it's been four months and this wine has I mean for what it is it's really really good so I'm just going to go ahead and cool stabilize it in the fridge for about two weeks about thirty degrees F and and bottle it up and and enjoy it so if you like my videos just please go ahead and subscribe if you have any comments that'd be happy to answering any questions in the comment section and check out my website called smart winemaking comm thanks for watching

Channel: The Home Winemaking Channel

Views: 39,370

Keywords: Wine, winemaking, beer, drinking, home winemaking, grapes, carboy, wine thief, winery, wine kit, making wine from a kit, how to improve a wine kit, wine lovers merlot, wine lover's merlot, wine lovers wine making kit, home wine making, wine making

Id: Pw3PRk6BbAw

Length: 7min 9sec (429 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2017