Growing grapes and making wine in Bellevue
Posted in storage and aging, tasting on May 21st, 2008
Back in March, I wrote about freezing wine: that it can preserve an open bottle and even improve it. It was something I had to see to believe, and I did. I froze a half-full bottle of red wine for over a month, thawed it out, shook it up (that’s one of the steps!), and […]
Posted in storage and aging on Apr 9th, 2008
The wine has fermented out, been racked, and is patiently aging in the basement. The winemaker, on the other hand, is not so patient. It isn’t brilliantly clear, but its flavor and aroma he’s interested in, so he bottles. The trouble with this approach is that a wine that isn’t clear has something in suspension, […]
Posted in storage and aging, tasting on Mar 12th, 2008
An open bottle of wine and no time to drink it
Julian Shultz at the Oxford Wine Room has endured a lot of friendly, and not so friendly, needling to tell us about freezing wine. Not only can an opened bottle, that would otherwise be ruined by oxidation, be preserved by freezing, it will be improved […]
Posted in enology, mead, measurement & testing, storage and aging, tasting, winemaking on Feb 7th, 2008
I looked in on five meads yesterday to see if they were ready to bottle. I was looking for clarity, I tasted them to see if they were pleasant to drink, and I measured the specific gravity (SG), pH, and titratable acidity (TA).
Name
SG
pH
TA (g/L)
2004 Plain Mead
1.001
3.05
5
2005 Apple Mead
0.995
3.39
5.2
2006 Experiment (boiled)
1.000
3.27
6
2006 Experiment (no heat)
1.000
3.29
5.3
2006 Grape Mead
1.000
3.51
5+
Ready […]
Posted in storage and aging on Dec 11th, 2007
More and more wine is bottled with synthetic cork or twist off caps. Many people associate these modern enclosures with cheap wine and that makes wineries reluctant to switch. It’s a shame, really, because we’ve learned so much since natural cork was state of the art. We’ve learned that 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), a substance that occurs […]