Author Archives: Erroll

A Cheap Way To Make Expensive Wine

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Grow the best grapes

Making good wine is expensive, but not in the way you might think. Oh sure, the things that top growers do to improve the quality of their harvest add to the cost. They analyze the soil and amend it to enhance their crop. They prune and train their vines, even to the point of plucking off individual leaves so that sunlight falls on the vine in just the right way, to keep their vines healthy and ensure that they bear the best fruit possible. They harvest in the early morning, when it’s still dark, and rush them to the winery so that the grapes are at their peak during crush.

Spare no expense to make the best wine

Winemakers then dote over the wine. They select just the right yeast. They adjust the sugar and acid levels to balance the wine. The may inoculate with malolactic bacteria to soften the wine, introduce tiny, controlled amounts of oxygen so that wine ages in just the right way, and so on.

Or just tell them it costs more

But scientists at the California Institute of Technology have found a simpler way: just raise the price. They asked volunteers to taste five different wines and told them the price of each one. What they didn’t tell them was that there were only three different wines. They had the volunteers taste a $90 bottle of wine twice, telling them it was a different $10 bottle of wine the second time. Similarly, a $5 bottle of wine reappeared as a $45 bottle. Functional MRIs showed that people liked the “more expensive” wine better – that is, the pleasure center of the brain showed more intense activity when they tasted the same wine, but believed it was more expensive.

Oh, and when they repeated the experiment without telling the volunteers how much the wine cost, the $5 bottle was rated highest.

Further reading

The National Academy of Sciences published the study. Here is a link to the abstract:

Abstract of the CIT study

Unfortunately, you must subscribe or buy one-time access to read the full article.

Update – 11/28/2008

Another study indicates that a higher price can “improve” a painkiller’s effectiveness.

Update – 4/19/2010 Quick and easy blind tasting

Tasting blind lets you see a wine the way it really is. Here’s how to run a quick and easy blind tasting at home.



How To Remove Lables From Wine Bottles

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Method #1: Soak and scrape

I know I’m not the only home winemaker who cleans and reuses commercial wine bottles, but the labels on these bottles are getting more stubborn every year. I like to use the “soak and scrape” method. The first step, immersing the bottles in water and Oxiclean, is part of my normal cleaning process. Sometimes the label comes right off, saving me the trouble, but if not it’s easier to scrape off after a good soak. In the second step, I get a good grip on the bottle so that it cant move, then I use a scraper (and ice scraper would work, but I actually use a plastic ruler) to remove the label.

Method #2: Buy wine with easily removed labels:

If you do this often enough, you’ll begin to notice that some labels always come off easily. On the other hand, some wineries act as if the fate of the planet depends on their labels not coming off for the next 10,000 years. I don’t want to single out Columbia Crest by name, but when I buy their wine, I do so knowing that I won’t get a reusable bottle out of the deal. There was a time when I would switch from ruler to ice scraper, from ice scraper to razor blade, and from razor blade to steel wool to get every last label off of every last bottle. These days, some wine bottles end up in the recycle bin again. I also buy Charles Shaw, yep that’s Trader Joe’s “Three Buck Chuck”, more often. Ok, nobody is going to gush about the complexity or refinement of the wine, but it’s not half bad and the labels come right off after a good soak!



Wine, Women, and Lawsuits?

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I was thinking about cranberry wine a few weeks ago, and mentioned that a local winery made some. It turns out that they call it “Cranberry Jubilee,” and I suspect the wording is deliberate. They’d probably get into legal trouble if they called their 20% cranberry 80% Chardonnay blend “Cranberry Wine.” Well, they might have some legal trouble anyway, but over not over that.

A tiff over a name

The winery, owned by three women and known for its “working girl” series of wines, is named “Olympic Cellars,” after the Olympic Peninsula in which they are located. It turns out that the U.S. Olympic Committee has exclusive, far reaching, and iron fisted rights to the word “Olympic” in the U.S. This goes way beyond normal trademark law in that no business or organization may use the O word without their permission. Normally, other outfits may use trademarked words for unrelated products or services. That’s why Fidelity National Financial, a title insurance company, and Fidelity Investments, the mutual fund and brokerage company, aren’t at each other’s throats.

An “amicable” demand

So how did this little winery escape the wrath of The Committee up to now? There’s an exception to the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act for businesses in the geographical area. Olympic Cellars is located in the Olympic Peninsula, but The Committee’s lawyers have threatened to sue unless Olympic Cellars turns down internet orders from people who haven’t visited the winery. So, someone vacationing in the Olympic Peninsula that visits the winery and signs up for their newsletter can go back home and order wine from them over the internet. Even The Committee won’t complain about that, but if the neighbors hear about this great little winery and try to order some, Olympic Cellars is supposed to turn them down. If they were to ship that bottle of wine to the neighbors, it would, “dilute the committee’s control of its trademarked word, and confuse people about which companies are official Olympic supporters.” The Committee goes on to say, and I’m not making this up, that they want to settle the matter amicably.

Further reading

This article goes into detail about Olympic Cellars trouble with The Committee, and this one tells of an author who faced The Committee’s wrath over a travel guide.

The Other Kind Of Hangover

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A few months ago, I described an easy way to clean a large fermenter, and concluded that, “It takes very little time and effort on your part, leaving you free to make more wine!” I wasn’t wrong about that, but there is a little snag lurking in that happy and optimistic statement: you have to actually take the time and make the effort or it won’t get done. It’s a problem I hinted at in my article on washing bottles, when I talked about setting bottles aside “until I can wash them.”

Sad but true: They won’t clean themselves

It turns out that a lot of things get set aside for a not-quite-as-brief-as-I’d-hoped interval. I know you bachelors out there are confused, “Just do that later, we’ve got wine to make!” you’re thinking. I know because that’s what I thought. But, stay with me for a minute, what happens when the things you need to make wine with need cleaning? What happens when other things, that you may not need right now, form a physical barrier in your wine making room? Right now there’s a 5-gallon bucket filled with water sitting in my utility sink. The place I’d move it to, next to the sink, is occupied by more buckets that need cleaning. The other side of the sink? One-gallon jugs that need to be cleaned. Some of you may have realized where I’m going with this. Sometimes you’ve got to do the cleaning today so you can make wine later.

Tomato Wine: First Racking

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Ten days after pitching the yeast, I siphoned the translucent, yellow, tomato wine into two 1-gallon jugs and a 1.5L magnum bottle. So 18 lb (8.2 kg) of tomatoes, 4.8 lb (2.2 kg) sugar, and 2.5 quarts (2.4 liters) water turned into about 9 liters (a little under 2.5 gallons) of wine. I still don’t have a good idea of what tomato wine will taste like. At this point it’s just tart and young. Lets see what happens after I add a little time!

Tomato Wine: Fermentation Complete

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It looked like fermentation was winding down, so I drew a sample for testing. The sample had some dissolved CO2 in it, and that can skew my tests in two ways. It can give rise to carbonic acid, which will push the titratable acidity (TA) higher. It can also make it look like there is more sugar in the sample than there really is. As the CO2 comes out of solution, in the form of bubbles, it physically pushes upward on the hydrometer which leads to a higher specific gravity (SG) reading.

SG: 1.000, pH 3.03, TA: 10 g/L

The TA went from 6.5 to 10 g/L in six days, which is a much bigger jump than I was expecting. Did the carbonic acid push it up that much? Or did I just botch the test? Either way, the thing to do is rack and set it aside for a while. When I come back to retest, the CO2 will have bled off and I’ll have better results.

Tomato Wine Recipe

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I sowed seeds that sprouted into seedlings. I transplanted the seedlings to beds. I fussed over the tomato plants. I planned. I harvested. Now, at last, I’m finally making tomato wine!

Ingredients

Juice from 18 lb (8.2 kg) tomatoes – about 1.67 gallons (6.3 liters)
4.84 lb (2.2 kg) sugar
2.5 quarts (2.4 liters) water
8 tsp (40 g) tartaric acid
2 tsp (10 g) diammonium phosphate
1 tsp (2.3 g) pectic enzyme
sulfite to 50 ppm (equivalent to two campden tablets)
premier cuvee yeast

Overview

Make a yeast starter and set it aside to grow. Juice the tomatoes and pour it into the fermenter. Dissolve the sugar in the water, boil, cool, and add to fermenter. Add sulfite, pectic enzyme, diammonium phosphate, and tartaric acid. Pitch the yeast starter when it is active.

Adjusting the sugar

I measured the pressed juice at:

Specific Gravity (SG): 1.024, pH: 4.23, Titratable Acidity (TA): 4 g/L

Based on those measurements, I decided to add 4.6 liters of SG 1.180 sugar syrup to the tomato juice. That’s 2.2 kg of sugar dissolved in 2.4 liters of water, and it ought to leave me with almost 11 liters of SG 1.090 juice. To determine how much sugar syrup to add in your own recipe, you can use this formula:

x = ( V * (TG – SG) ) / (1.180 – TG)

where x is the amount of sugar water, in liters, to add
V is the volume of must, in liters (6.3, in my case)
TG is your specific gravity target (1.090)
SG is the current specific gravity of your must (1.024)

The 1.180 is the SG of the sugar syrup (I was running out of variable names!)

Adjusting the acid

Once I adjusted the sugar, I knew what the final volume of the must was going to be, about 11 liters. Dry white wine musts are normally between 7 – 9 g/L TA, but I decided to aim a little low at 6 g/L. I wanted to add some acid to get the pH down, but not down so much that it would inhibit fermentation. It’s easy to add more later, and I expected to do just that. At any rate, I already had about 25 g (6.3 liters of juice at 4 g/L), and I was targeting 66 g (11 liters of must at 6 g/L), so I needed to add about 41 g. After the additions, I measured again:

SG: 1.104, pH: 3.02, TA: 6.5 g/L

My actual sugar and acid levels came out a little higher than I predicted, probably because my weight and volume measurements are imprecise – close enough. Now I’ve got a little under three gallons of sweet acidic tomato juice. I don’t know what tomato wine is going to taste like, but this juice is really odd. There is a strong flavor of tomato, which I like but is completely out of place in such a sweet juice. I hope the yeast like it, because I just pitched the starter.

Update 2/28/2008: Too much acid!

After fermentation, I measured the TA at 9-10 g/L. An error in my measurements might explain the apparent jump. I took two measurements just before pitching the yeast, however, and they were consistent with each other. I took two more measurements after it had fermented out, and they were both showed an increase of 2.5-3.5 g/L. I know that some acid forms during fermentation, but this much? I’m not sure what happened here, but I think the lesson is to wait until your wine is fermented out before you adjust your acid.

Tomato Wine: Defrosted, Crushed, and Pressed

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Collecting Free Run Tomato Juice


I started with about 18 lb (8.2 kg) of frozen cherry tomatoes that came up to the 4-gallon (15 liter) mark of the bucket. After they thawed, I lightly crushed them with a long spoon. That left me with about 2.25 gallons of must, which I loaded into my three-bucket press. A few hours later, I had 1.67 gallons (6.3 liters) of juice. My initial measurements were:

Specific Gravity (SG): 1.024, pH: 4.23, Titratable Acidity (TA): 4 g/L

That ain’t grape juice

Because it will change the volume significantly, it’s best to adjust the sugar first. And it will be a big adjustment. A wine with 12% alcohol starts with juice at an SG around 1.090. Dissolving sugar in boiling water is a great way to sanitize it and make sure it mixes well with the juice. I’ll be adding so much I’m going to concentrated it to an SG of 1.180. That’s close to one part sugar and one part water. Any more sugar and I might have trouble dissolving it.

How much syrup? How much acid?

Ok, if you’ve got 6.3 liters of juice with an SG of 1.024, adding 4.6 liters SG 1.180 syrup should yield almost 11 liters of SG 1.090 juice. That initial 6.3 liters of juice had 4 g/L, about 25 g, of acid. To get 6 g/L in our final 11 liters of juice, we need to add about 40 g. Sometimes pressing takes longer than you think. Sometimes schedules get out of whack. By the time I had my estimates for sugar and acid additions, it was past midnight. I decided to add the acid right away, as that would push down the pH and help protect the juice from spoilage, and go to bed. We’re nearly there, and tomorrow, I’ll pull this all together into a recipe for tomato wine!

Defrosting Tomatoes

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Four gallons (15 liters) of frozen Gold Nugget tomatoes


I finally pulled the 18 lb (8+ kg) of tomatoes out of the freezer. I’ll be making a white wine from them, so once they defrost I’ll press them into juice. Then I can see what I’ve got in terms of sugar and acid, make adjustments, and start fermenting! I say this every season, but I don’t know why I waited so long. While I’m growing and harvesting my tomatoes (and rhubarb and grapes) I can’t wait to make wine from them. Then I get busy. Well, at least I’m starting my 2007 vintage in 2007.

Racking The Merlot And Cherry Wine

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I made good use of my new 3-gallon (11 liter) carboys this weekend. Three 1-gallon (3.785 liter) jugs, plus one wine bottle, of cherry wine fit perfectly into the carboy. Eight gallons (30 liters) of Merlot filled a 5-gallon (19 liter) and a 3-gallon carboy with a little left over in a wine bottle.

Higher yield from red wine?

I’m still surprised by the yield from my Merlot grapes. I bought 100 lb (45.45 kg) in October, and I was expecting about 5-gallons of wine, which is about what I’m getting from the 100 lb of Chardonnay grapes I bought at the same time. I think I know what happened. I treated the Merlot with pectic enzyme, then fermented it like any red wine, so the skin and pulp were soaking in a water-turning-to-alcohol mixture for a week. This, to say nothing the fermenting yeast, broke down cell walls and membranes making it a lot easier to squeeze liquid out of the pulp. The Chardonnay, on the other hand, were pressed immediately after crushing. The result: more Merlot wine from the same amount of grapes. I’ll have to make a note of this for next year to see if the extra yield from red wine is real or if this year’s experience was just a fluke.