Beaverdale Rioja Not Great

[mar]

Hi,

First post, hope it's in the right place.

Took up home brewing 6 months or so ago and have had very good results with my ales, and the lagers I have done for visiting friends.

My passion is drinking wine so I was itching to get going with a red wine kit.

My first was a Beaverdale Rioja, followed instructions to the letter and it's been in the bottle for a month. I tried a drop at bottling and tried another glass a few days ago. Now I know it's early days but it's not great. The taste is still quite fruity and perhaps weak. Am I being too impatient, I know it improves month over month but should it taste kind of OK by now…say a cheap bottle of supermarket wine kind of taste? A month ago I started a Beaverdale Merlot, it’s just about at bottling time, I’m losing a bit of faith in it now given what I have had so far with the Rioja. It’s quite disappointing but I haven’t given up hope yet.

Any comments? Thank you.

 

[tonyhibbett]

Making red wine from concentrate and sugar can't match the genuine article. However, I recently made a chianti classico taste pretty good by adding oak chips, dried elderberries, tinned and frozen black cherries, frozen strawberries and raspberries to the concentrate. I matured it in an oak barrel for 20 days. It could do with a month in bottle. All the extras add significantly to the cost, but required if you want good body, colour, flavour and aroma.

 

[goodolpete]

I make pinot grigio and barollo, always brew short
At 20 litres and leave it 9 months at least, normally
A year before drinking. I alwars pour into a decanter
An hour or two before drinking.

 

[Tony1951]

Making red wine from concentrate and sugar can't match the genuine article.

My brother is married to a French woman and I remember in about 1976 mentioning to her father in jest that like him I made wine, but unlike him, I didn't have a small vineyard (he had about three acres of vines). He was pretty derisory about my use of concentrate and sugar - especially the adding of sugar to the must and called it 'vin sucre' - sugar wine. I don't know anything about modern wine kits, but if folk are adding a kilo of sugar to a tin of concentrate, the wine will be thin and rather tasteless, I would think, kind of like when people add a kilo of table sugar to a tin of hopped malt and then get thin, tasteless beer.

It might be a lot different if the wine was made of two kit cans and no sugar.

 

[engineer]

i have just bagged (in a box) several 6 bottle beaverdale kits as a trial, Shiraz, Merlot, Cab Sav, Barrola and Sauvignon Blanc. Mostly to see if they are better than the cellar 7 level kits which are about 25% cheaper. When comparing the one thing you must do is give them the same time to mature. To me that means a minimum of 6 months and ideally a year in storage. I always make as described by the supplier first and if its ok then all is good, if not then as Pete says brew short, it will help the flavour. I also decant into a jug and leave for several hours before drinking........patience they say is a virtue, and a necessity in making good wine from kits.

Give it more time, while you wait there are juice wines and turbo cider to play with.

 

[mar]

Thanks for the replies. Patience then, I'll just enjoy the ale in the meantime!

80% of my bottling is in corked bottles, the other 20% I have used once opened screw top bottles...do the cork ones age better or will I not be able to tell the difference?

OK to store in the garage do you think...it's not insulated so temperature is pretty much the same as outside (down to 8 degrees or so overnight and going up to 17 or so during the day at the moment). I'm running out of wine/beer storage in the house, my Mrs is already complaining about finding bottles everytime she opens a cupboard :nono: