Sparkling Cranberry Experiments Results

Roughly about this time last year, I posted about some experimental sparking cranberry wines that I was trying.  Back then, my lovely girlfriend (now my wife) helped me get ready for their secondary fermentations in the bottle.  She'll be the first to tell you that this was a pretty big endeavor since we were investigating the affect of 6 different variables as part of this experiment.  Each of the 3 different base wines (cranberry, cranberry-cider, and cranberry-niagara) were also split into 2 carbonation styles (a lightly carbonated spumante and a fully carbonated sparkling).  If that wasn't enough, I also wanted to try a potentially labor-saving fermentation style using an encapsulated yeast (read the original post for more details).

Since then, the bottles have been sitting quietly doing their thing.  During the winter, I housed them in an upstairs closet to stay warm and then in the basement during the summer to keep relatively cool.  After almost 12 months of hopefully fermenting, I decided to pop a few bottles open a few weeks ago while I was clearing out the basement in preparation for winery construction to begin.

Drumroll please....

"Blech."  Followed by "dang it...shoot" (the words were actually a bit stronger, but this is a family show).

Cranberry (base wine made from 2 lbs cranberries/gallon of water)

Very few bubbles at all.  The spumante bottles were barely fizzy at all and the sparkling bottles had only a light fizz that disappeared quickly after opening.  Pink color with a strong cranberry taste, a thin mouth feel, and a very bitter finish.

Cranberry-Cider (base wine made from 1 lbs cranberries/gallon of apple cider)

More bubbles, but only in about half the bottles.  The sparkling bottles had the largest number of "bubbly" bottles but still had a significant number of duds.  The sparkled bottles did produce a nice mousse of bubbles that lingered for a decent period of time.  Pale orange color with a barely perceptible cranberry taste that was dominated by the aroma & taste of old dried apples.

Cranberry-Niagara (base wine made from 1 lbs cranberries/gallon of Welch's White Grape Juice)

Just about every bottle had sparkled with only 1-2 duds  The spumante bottles were refreshingly fizzy but I wanted more.  The sparkled bottles had a nice lingering mousse of small, fine trailed bubbles.  Bigger mouth feel than the rest.  Pale pink-orange color with a barely perceptible cranberry taste that was dominated by the aroma & taste of foxy niagara grapes (like drinking a dry version of Sparkling Welch's Grape Juice).

In the end, I opened every bottle and dumped them down the drain.  The Cranberry-Niagara produced the highest quality sparkling wine, but did not have a flavor that I really wanted to ever taste again.  Rather than waste valuable storage space on a wine that I wasn't going to drink, I dumped them.

Some lessons learned for the future:
1)  Amount of cranberries in the recipe needs to be fine tuned.  2 lbs/gal resulted in too strong of a flavor, while 1 lb/gal gave too weak of a cranberry flavor.
2)  Use a grape base for best mouthfeel and higher chance of complete carbonation.
3)  Forgo the "foxy" grapes like Niagara and use a more neutral flavored V. vinifera grape as the base
4)  Encapsulated yeast do work well for "sparkling" wine production, although the jury is still out on whether I'd use this "yeast-in-a-cap" method again.  Worked well when it worked, but still had a larger number of duds than I would like.  Reasonable for amateur use, but not commercial use.

Salute,
Noel

Football vs Wine Bottling---the bottling won!

For those not following the news, or simply living on the planet Neptune, Tim Tebow (I believe some other members of the Denver Broncos also came) was in town yesterday for a play-off game with the New England Patriots.  I think most of the northeastern US came to a grinding halt while everyone hunkered in front of their TVs for the evening to watch the battle of Tom Brady vs God.

But not at Aaronap Cellars!  I had some wine to bottle and a lovely assistant to help, so to heck with the game.  If you scroll down the blog, you'll notice that I mentioned some experiments with sparkling cranberry wine in my last post.  The primary fermentation for the base wines were all completed, so it's time to filter, bottle, add the liqueur de tirage, and get the secondary fermentation underway.

Sounds simple, huh?  Well, friends & acquaintances know that nothing is done simply at Aaronap Cellars and this was no different.  I didn't have just one cranberry wine, but THREE! 

1) Cranberry base made from cranberries and water (2 lbs cranberries/gallon)
2) Cranberry Cider made from cranberries and Carlson Orchards Premium Cider Blend (1 lb/gallon)
3) Cranberry-Niagra made from cranberries and Welch's White Grape Juice (1 lb/gallon)

All the wines were filtered in sequence through coarse, medium, and fine filters until they were polished & crystal clear.  And then the fun began...

I had read about an innovative secondary fermentation method that avoids the laborious process of riddling & disgorging during sparkling wine production.  To give proper credit, Zac Brown had posted this method on WinePress.US and I really wanted to give it a try.  Essentially, I placed 1g of a QA-23 yeast that has been encapsulated in alginate beads (sold as Pro-Restart) in the hollow portion of a plastic champagne cork.  A 3/4-inch disk of stainless steel screen (sold as faucet aerator or smoke pipe screens) was then wedged in the top of the cork to hold the yeast beads in place.  This was actually harder than it sounds as the screens are pretty stiff, but after some flexing and slow pressure, it was actually possible to push the screens in.

For the liqueur de tirage, I used Coopers carbonation drops (made of ~3 g invert sugar) that are normally used to carbonate beer.  I further complicated matters by splitting each batch of wine into half and adding 2 Coopers drops to one half and 4 drops to the other to give a frizzante-style lightly carbonated sparkler and a full-blown carbonated sparkling wine.  After the drops were added, each bottle was capped with a yeast-filled cork and covered with wire hood, and then inverted to dissolve the sugar drops and place the wine in contact with the yeast.  At the moment, the bottles are sitting in my guest bedroom closet hopefully beginning to undergo the secondary fermentation that produces those lovely "bubbles"

Salute,
Noel

p.s.  And in case you're completely out of media touch:  Tom Brady won.  Actually, not so much as won, but crushed, obliterated, demolished, stunned, bowled over, etc.   He even punted for pete's sakes!