The chardonnay is clearing nicely. This kit gets racked once before bottling time, to give it an extra polish. I hope it settles out as well as the Pinot Gris did.
Tag archive: wine kit
This bottle might be corked, or else the flavors are changing drastically as this wine ages. Much more herbal in flavor than the day of bottling. This one might test my patience, but I’m convinced that age will help this wine mature eventually.
In making this wine, I became obsessed with keeping oxygen out of the wine. Watching my hubby make beer, he would often purge the carboys with CO2 or nitrogen gas before racking into them to reduce oxygen exposure; I rationalized that this should also be good practice for winemaking. However, after I started incorporating this […]
I wanted to call my chardonnay “Torrey Pines”, after the state park here where the rare Torrey Pine grows in a protected area. They are really neat pine trees, they grow near the coast and so tend to have a windswept shape to them. So, to get a good picture we drove to the park […]
Chardonnay is at SG 1.00, time to rack! Smells yummy! You can see the bits of the oak chips that were added in the primary. Some did make it through the racking cane into the secondary, but it should be OK — they’ll fall out over time (I assume).
I have discovered that the wine kit companies make special limited edition wines every year that are supposed to be “exceptional quality.” I’ve been pretty impressed with the quality so far, so these should be really exciting! Here’s what I got: Pacific Quartet: A blend of very cool whites from the Pacific, including Vidal from […]
Looking over the inventory and considering the wines we often drink, I invested in an Australian Chardonnay kit. This one has oak – 120 g toasted French oak total — so should be interesting. They recommend aging 1 – 3 months, peak aging 1 – 2 years.
Well, it’s *supposed* to be an easy-drinking red table wine, anyway. The Winexpert “Bourgeron Rouge” (AKA red burgundy) is started, I’m very curious how this one will turn out. I assume this is basically pinot noir, although it’s difficult to find out much detail about some of these kits.
Let this wine sit a *little* more than 7 days, just didn’t get around to it. The benefit is that the wine cleared nicely and does not need to be filtered! Got fast seal tool for shrink caps now, much easier! First bottle just after bottling, not bad at all. Very fruity nose with apples […]
The vinbrite gravity filtering unit is a little intimidating. It’s easy to put together, then I ran some water through the siphon plus filter unit, then set it up to filter the wine. It doesn’t sit in the top of the carboy very stably, so I did hold on to it for most of the […]