I want to make a Sauternes style wine....

[dpile1]

Basically I want to have a crack at making a Sauternes style wine. For those that aren't aware, Sauternes is a sweet white wine whose grapes have been infected by Noble Rot.

http://www.oddbins.com/product-details/ ... rnes-375cl

Other than being just another sweet wine, Sauternes has a gorgeous golden colour and a unique flavour akin (IMO) to raisins. Sauternes normally has an APV of around 14-15%.

Here's my proposed idea, would someone mind looking over it to see if there's any obvious I've missed? I'm going to be going with raisins as the main constituent and brown sugar to try and capture the colour. The idea is for one gallon, it's not a recipe - just a process.

2.5Kg of chopped / blended Raisins boiled in about two litres of water to extract as much flavour and colour as possible. Addition of cold water to bring the lot to around 4.5 litres.
Addition of brown sugar to bring OG to about 1.105. I'm also likely to add some acid to taste, but no tannin. Glycerine will also be a necessity I think. The entire mixture (including the blended raisins) would be placed in a bucket with a cloth to allow for maximum flavour and colour extraction and fermented there for 5 days or so before being strained and moved to a DJ.

I'd allow the wine to ferment out to dryness (.998) giving me about 14%. Then CT and PS, then back sweeten with more brown sugar to taste.

What do you guys think? Have I missed something obvious? Do you think that 2.5kgs of Raisins is enough for one gallon?

Any comments very, very much appreciated. :thumb:

Darren

 

[Ken L]

I can't really comment on the above because I've never brewed with Rasins but I did make a date wine this year that has a lot of the charictaristics you describe - Golden colour, rich honeyed/malty flavour etc.
I used five packs of dates when they were on offer (all five packs for £1) from tesco, a lite of apple juice, the juice of a lemon and a kilo of sugar. I didn't take OG/FG measurements as I fermented the dates on the pulp for four days so they wouldn't have been accurate anyway but it ended up very strong and not quite dry so you may have to up the sugar a bit to get where you want to go with it.
Just thought i'd throw it in 'cause with christmas comming, there's bound to be cheap dates around soon.

BTW: It fermented like crazy and even after straining through a fine nylon bag, it threw lots of sediment but cleared beautifully. I bottled into 16 small Stella bottles that hold just enough to fill one large or two small wine glasses.

 

[dpile1]

Thanks for your reply Ken, sounds like a fantastic idea to use dates. Could be just what I'm looking for.

Thank you,

Darren

 

[Moley]

Sounds ok to me, perhaps 1 tsp of citric or juice of 1 lemon, and I would recommend a bit of tannin.

Raisins are two-thirds sugar, so 2kg should give the OG you are looking for, with no additional sugar required.

Glycerine shouldn't be necessary, and make sure you rinse the raisins well before use because they are often glazed with vegetable oil.

 

[dpile1]

Thanks for looking over the recipe guys. Well I've made it up and after consulting a few books (CJJ Berry) I decided to demijohn it immediately after just half a day in the fermenting bucket. No doubt this'll bite me on the a** but I thought I'd give try.

Anyway, I ended up using 2.2Kgs of Raisins although it needed about 400 grams of sugar to bulk out the OG to 1.125. I included the juice from a lemon and a touch of tannin.

I mashed up the raisins in a blender and boiled them with 2 litres of water for a few minutes to kill all the nasties. Then added on some pre-boiled cold water to bring it up to 4.5L.

A little bit of (brown) sugar brought it up to 1.125 as said. Added the yeast once cooled and then a few hours later strained the liquid into the DJ. I had to press the raisins as they'd soaked up a fair bit of the liquid.

Here's a photo (taken on phone so apologies for the quality)

The actual result isn't quite the colour I was aiming for although the photograph makes it out to be a lot browner than it actually is. It’s sort of a really dark honey colour.

Hopefully some of the ‘darkness’ will drop out of the colour as the fermentation continues and during clearing – only time will tell. It’s going like the clappers at the minute so it’ll be spending the night in my sink tonight just in case. I’ll keep you all updated.

Darren