That's very interesting. I'm going to make red wine from Cabernet Sauvignon juice I bought on Amazon. I'm thinking of trying this using a nylon mesh filter over the top of the container. Have you ever made wine or mead from juice like this? Given my rookie understanding about the importance of oxygen during the first few days of primary, I'm giving this serious consideration.

Thanks! I'm glad I could help.

Thank you!

Thank you! We will see how it goes. My hope is that I can grow the channel a good bit now that I have a lot more time to put into it. I also have the "Cool Stuff Guys Like" channel, so between the two it should keep be very busy.

Subscribed to CSGL too! :)

Thank you!!!

Thank you!

Thanks man! If the response to that clip was great enough, I was going to change the channel over to "The Home Metal Channel" and exclusively rock out about wine.

What winery was it from? I have tried quite a few orange wines and have always been let down. If I could find a good one, I may devote some more effort into that genre. In theory, they would drink like a red but I have never found that to be true. It has been quite a few years since I had explored orange wines, so maybe some wineries have dialed in the process a little better.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel It was from Caroline Cellars

Awesome! You should get a few grapes in a couple years and really get things roaring in three. Growing grapes is quite a learning experience!

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel dealing with the heat and deer will be a trial for sure haha

Thank you! It was a lot of work to step up the quality to this level. I hope it helps to bring the content to a broader audience.

Awesome!! Glad I could help. It is certainly quite an experience those first few years when you are getting it all figured out.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel we appreciate you

I think you have a good start. 71B will reduce the malic acid, which will not hurt with blueberries. I would probably plan to press relatively quick. I experimented with blueberries fermented on the skins, and pressed after a short cold soak and slightly preferred the lesser skin time. The batch with less skin time was treated like a white wine and fermented cool to preserve the fruit character vs to extract from the skins. Blueberries are high in citric acid, which is difficult to overcome. In the end, your best bet is to back sweeten the wine to bring it into balance with the acid. Even with considerable sugar, the wine will taste "dry" since citric acid is so tart compared to tartaric acid. To balance as if it were a dry red you will likely need about 20grams per liter of sugar. To make it a crowd pleaser and drink like blueberry pie, you will need 50+ grams per liter. I have a detailed video on back sweetening if that is a route you want to take. Don't just add the sugar to the dry wine, or it will begin to ferment again until all that new sugar is gone...

​@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel Thanks for the detailed reply! It's good to know we are on the same page as far as back-sweetening. I was anticipating having to do that. I will watch your video again to make sure I do it properly. I hadn't thought about keeping them on the skins for a short period of time. At what point would you press? When you say fermented cooler, what sort of temperature range? My wine-making area is around 71.5°F, so getting it much cooler than that might be tricky. Thanks in advance for the information!

Thanks David!

You are welcome! Thanks for watching.

Thanks! It really just comes down to how much time and energy you can put into the wines. There are some advantages that come with large scale winemaking, like access to state of the art equipment and processes (reverse osmosis, etc). You may also have more influence over decisions happening in the vineyard whereas a home winemaker really doesn't. A winemaker with the same skill level is probably going to make about the same quality of wine in either case. At some point, you just did everything right for that wine and there is nothing more you could have done. One huge advantage a home winemaker does have is the ability to make the wine to suite their palate instead of appealing to the masses. In some markets, a dry red wine will not sell as well as a sweet dessert wine. They may not really be able to make the wine that they want to make in their market.

You are very welcome!!! It is hard to say for sure what is causing it. A surplus of minerals can often cause a haze in a wine. If a red wine begins to oxidize, it will lose it's brilliance and eventually, if severe enough become cloudy. This is also the case if the wine has malic acid remaining, which can cause a sluggish, prolonged malolactic fermentation. I don't like to use fining agents with red wines, as they can steal some body from the wine. Tannin can help fine the wine naturally though, and I do add quite a lot of tannin to red wines.

Open fermentation is really only for when you are fermenting on the grape skins. A red must on the skins has an insane oxygen grabbing potential. Yeast alone will eat up oxygen if they have the ability. When yeast eats sugar in the presence of oxygen (aerobic), it will produce water and CO2, and multiply more easily. When it happens anaerobically, as will happen in the majority of the must, even if open top fermented it will create alcohol and CO2 but can be come stressed more easily. A white wine will also ferment very happily in an "open top", but you will not capture as many esters as you will in a closed ferment. I generally will use a yeast that produces little to no hydrogen sulfide when fermenting a white though, because the conditions are naturally a lot more stressful to the yeast. Normally a place selling juice may have little to no winemaking expertise or is in the business of keeping it easy for the home winemaker. I find that a lot if first timers, burn out of the hobby and will neglect the fermentation. If this happens in a closed container, the wine may turn out okay. If you left it in an open container after fermentation is complete, you will quickly have a bucket of vinegar. Oxygen is a funny thing with wine... the wine wants and needs a lot of it when it is fermenting but it can wreck the wine when it is aging. I like to think about it like this... In nature, grapes that fall off the vine ferment into wine with no human intervention. They will then very quickly go through a second aerobic fermentation into vinegar, ethyl acetate and other various compounds. They continue to this breakdown series until you are left with water and elements again. As a winemaker, we like the first part of the series, then we want to pause it indefinitely before it gets to the vinegar part.

Hi dhaduch. The "as clean and sterile as possible" is more important when you are working with a sterile medium, like beer. With wine (from fresh grapes), you really have to work under the assumption that the must is fully loaded with bacteria and wild yeasts, good and bad. The trick we generally do is add a small sulfite addition before fermenting, which will not sterilize it but will suppress most bacteria and spoilage yeast strains. This gives a clear runway for saccharomyces cerevisiae (wine yeast) to establish, since it has a naturally high sulfite tolerance. From there, we do everything we can to keep it happy, and it does the rest of the work for us by creating CO2 and alcohol which makes it much harder for any wild organisms to take off. Even after fermentation though we are assuming that the wine is not completely free from spoilage microbes. It is always important to assure that they don't have what they need to establish though. We want all the nutrient to be consumed by the yeast, and create a "nutrient desert" after fermentation is complete. We want to make sure that no more air is entering the wine than what the redox potential of the wine can handle. And we want to maintain a free SO2 level that is high enough to prevent spoilage organisms like acetobacter from doing their thing. If you follow these rules, you should never really have spoilage. Note... if you ferment a red without that air contact, it will usually too reductive (opposite of oxidized) and smell like rotten eggs which leads to a burnt rubber taste in the finished wine. As for the malolactic fermentation. Malic acid is very sour, but so are the other acids in wine. If the wine has a low pH or high titratable acidity, even if it has completed MLF, it will taste tart. The natural sweetness of alcohol can offset this tartness, or the natural bitterness of tannin can exaggerate the tartness. It is all about getting the balance right for the wine.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannelMany ... MANY thanks for the excellent information. I got into this craft just about a year ago. I've made a few batches of both wine and mead and have had reasonable success. But the more I get into this, the more there is to learn. And that's a good thing. My goal is not to become an expert (side note: as I have WAY too many hobbies!), but it is important to get my hands around as much as I can so that I'm not scratching my head wondering what went wrong .... too many times. Basically, it's not difficult to turn juice into wine. But the craft part of the hobby comes into tweaking, improving and understanding the chemistry as much as possible and practical. I think the goal is to learn a lot with the eventual outcome being to reduce it all to some simple, basic rules, notes and parameters. I think that's the human learning process - LOTS of details bubble up to some basic understanding. I digress. Thank you again for the information.

It is possible that the wine is going through MLF or that the yeast is struggling due to a low or lack of nutrient. It is also possible that a non-saccharomyces yeast or bacteria has begun to ferment what remains. I would probably sniff it and make sure you are not getting reductive, hydrogen sulfide vibes. Check the specific gravity and see where that stands also. It should be around 0.995 when it is about complete. If it is higher, swirl it up a couple times a week to get any yeast that is getting buried on the bottom back into suspension. With a once or twice a week swirl, it should finish up in a few weeks if it is actually yeast that is fermenting.

Haha, nice. At this point it may be undergoing malolactic fermentation or a non-saccharomyces yeast may be doing it's thing. Normally wine yeast will plow through within a month, even in relatively cold conditions. It may also be that the sugar levels were high enough that the yeast basically fizzled out towards the end. This is pretty rare, but some home winemakers go heavy handed on the initial gravity/brix so it is a little more common in the home winemaking space.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannelWhen I get around to measuring the % I'll let you know what it is.

Maybe this harvest I will do some more experimenting with orange wines. I was very excited about them years ago and tried as many as I could in the Finger Lakes, and my excitement quickly faded. They didn't drink like a red at all and didn't have any of the favorable qualities of a white either. It was like the worst of both worlds. I may go on the R&D trail to see if there is a such thing as a good orange wine. For white wines, we go through great lengths to reduce polyphenol content and it really pays off in quality. An orange wine is doing exactly the opposite. My current stance (which may change) is that you can make a decent "white style" wine from some red varietals but to make a good wine in the style of a red from white grapes is a lot more challenging, if not impossible.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel just like any style of wine, many things go into it. I guess consuming mediocre white or red wine that your palate is used to anyway is much easier than drinking mediocre orange that you have no experience with. anyway, let me know if you have any questions regarding, fermenting and aging skin contact wines.

@@TheHomeWinemakingChannel I agree with you. Orange wines can taste like spoiled white wine - it ends up tasting like the worst of both worlds rather than the best of both worlds. I would far rather a good Rose than an orange wine.

He meant Malolactic bacteria

@@bradsmylie3109 I know, was trying to make a joke