Supermarket Merlot grape juice

[dracunculus]

Well here it is all cleared, fined and filtered. It's a pleasant looking light red and for comparison the wine on the left is a red grape WOW.

Here's some in my sample syringe... nurse! 10mm Merlot for this patient, stat!
:grin:

Taste is very young and light, didn't really have much of a body to it and it was very dry indeed (and I prefer a dry wine) so I may have to back-sweeten this. Still it's gone into the dark where I'll give it 8 weeks or so to mature a bit and then see what it tastes like.

I'm going to start a new batch today with 4 litres + sugar to aim for a 12% ABV (the one above is 13%). Will see what kind of difference the extra litre makes. The juice is up at full price (£1.85/l) now so with sugar / yeast etc you're probably pushing 9 quid for 6 bottles which isn't far cheaper than the price of a decent Beaverdale kit. So it might not make much sense economically but it's fun going "off piste"
:

 

[tonyhibbett]

Pretty much as expected, and well done for following that through.

 

[musher]

I've just started one with 3 Waitrose merlot, one apple juice, tea & pectolase. It certainly smelt very good as it went in :)

I added a bit of sugar, but typically I didn't get an OG reading.

 

[oldbloke]

If fresh pressed merlot juice gives a rose it makes you wonder what they add to the kit juice for the red colouring. Processed grape skins, fruit juices like blackcurrant or elderberry juice, red food colouring or all of the above ?

It's surprisingly little known that the real difference between red and white wine is that red is fermented with the skins in, and white isn't. The colour come from the skins.

 

[Tim_Crowhurst]

If fresh pressed merlot juice gives a rose it makes you wonder what they add to the kit juice for the red colouring. Processed grape skins, fruit juices like blackcurrant or elderberry juice, red food colouring or all of the above ?

It's surprisingly little known that the real difference between red and white wine is that red is fermented with the skins in, and white isn't. The colour come from the skins.

You mean red and blanc-de-noir whites. Blanc-de-blanc white comes from white grapes.

 

[musher]

My merlot effort currently has a fantastic colour in the DJ.

I chopped & put a half bunch of red grapes into my elderflower wine as I thought I'd use them up rather than adding some sultanas. That has a lovely pink blush to it

 

[tonyhibbett]

If we take the Wilco 30 bottle kit as the lowest standard, with 1.7 kg of compound, of which 41% is grape juice concentrate. That's 476 g., equivalent to 0.357 litres, which in turn equates to 1.428 litres of grape juice for 23 litres of wine. That's 14%! Next one up is Winebuddy at 20%. 2 litres of the merlot juice per 5 litre batch gives you 40%, which is actually better than Muntons premium, which is 41%, but only about half is actually merlot. Extra tannin is added to make up the deficit, but no tartaric acid is added, in which it would be equally deficient as well as natural yeast nutrients.
Youngs cellar 7 is cheaper than this, probably on account of having just plain sugar in the compound as opposed to invert sugar and/or glucose syrup. It makes no claims to include any varietal gjc, but on the basis that Hedgehog crisps were withdrawn because they contained no trace of hedgehog, one might hope that there is some varietal juice in there somewhere. Either way, Cellar 7 merlot is as good as, if not better than the cheap end of the supermarket shelf, and is acceptable to those who like a full-bodied red.
As stated earlier, the Waitrose merlot juice does not have enough sugar to make the typical 11% abv one would expect as minimum. This means that the grapes were below par for wine, because more sugar than is legally permitted would have to be added to bring it up to strength. Even if you used no water, you would still have to add sugar, about 1.5 kilos for 5 gallons. A suitable compromise might be to use 3 litres per 5 litre batch, with added sugar, tannin and acid, which would be significantly cheaper than a Muntons premium, with 50% more grape juice and 3 times the amount of genuine merlot. It will only have 60% of the colour, depth, body and flavour of genuine merlot, but strictly speaking, it could compare well with more expensive kits, particularly if oak chips are used.