I made up a couple of white wine kits recently, and a funny thing happened.
When the time came to degass my wine, I made use of a high tech, homemade degassing tool of my own cunning design. It was a machanism of subtle genius and effective simplicity.
A steel balloon whisk in the cuck of a hand drill.
I had two fermenters on the go. My marvellous tool worked brilliantly for the first, but when I did the second, I suffered a mishap. The whisk fell out of the chuck and sank down under 5 gallons of cloudy wine. I had no easy way to retrieve it, so I left it to steep in the wine for the 4 days that it took for the wine to clear properly. I bottled it last night.
Now the normal fermenter tasted as expected. A young wine with a slight yeasty twang, just needing to lay down for a month or two to mature into a perfectly acceptable drinking wine. The fermenter with added balloon whisk however, had developed a mild but distinct metalic flavour which could not in all honesty be described as 'pleasant'.
My question is this: Based on the experiences of you good sirs, will this steely vino develop into something drinkable given a couple of months in the garage? Or is it more likely that my wine rack is now laden with thirty bottles of swill, fit only to be drunk by a smug cyborg after the robot uprising?
(The worst part of it is that I didn't label the bottles until after everything was bottled. So I have no way of knowing which is which!)
When the time came to degass my wine, I made use of a high tech, homemade degassing tool of my own cunning design. It was a machanism of subtle genius and effective simplicity.
A steel balloon whisk in the cuck of a hand drill.
I had two fermenters on the go. My marvellous tool worked brilliantly for the first, but when I did the second, I suffered a mishap. The whisk fell out of the chuck and sank down under 5 gallons of cloudy wine. I had no easy way to retrieve it, so I left it to steep in the wine for the 4 days that it took for the wine to clear properly. I bottled it last night.
Now the normal fermenter tasted as expected. A young wine with a slight yeasty twang, just needing to lay down for a month or two to mature into a perfectly acceptable drinking wine. The fermenter with added balloon whisk however, had developed a mild but distinct metalic flavour which could not in all honesty be described as 'pleasant'.
My question is this: Based on the experiences of you good sirs, will this steely vino develop into something drinkable given a couple of months in the garage? Or is it more likely that my wine rack is now laden with thirty bottles of swill, fit only to be drunk by a smug cyborg after the robot uprising?
(The worst part of it is that I didn't label the bottles until after everything was bottled. So I have no way of knowing which is which!)
