Red Bordailles / Bordeaux Progress, 08-03-08
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| From Wine Making S.. |
According to the instructions, we should have done this step today two days ago but we were out of town. We cleaned everything then racked the wine from the carboy to the fermentation bin. Since fermentation was complete, we decided to do a taste test with another red wine. Alexis gave us a bottle of pretty awesome wine last week, and so we used this one as the comparison. That was mistake #1.
It was a blind taste test, and they looked exactly the same in the glass, but just one sniff and you knew which was which. Ours smelled very fruity and underdeveloped compared to the ‘real wine’.
Our ‘blind taste test’ of our wine produced the following notes: Smells raw, smells scary, taste is underdeveloped. On the positive side, we have paid for and drank wines that tasted like this before. The other wine smells more like what we think wine should smell like, and less like ripening fruit. The ‘real wine’ also had a much more complex flavor.
After drinking a 1/2 glass of the wine, Melissa made a visit to the toilet. Or, as they say in the Bordeaux region of France ‘le toilette’
We had a hard time siphoning the wine from the carboy to the fermentation bin, and we think its because:
1. Our hose wa 2 ft shorter than it needs to be
2. The height difference between the two bins was too small at first, so we moved it, then the difference was too large.
3. Hose may have been pinching at the top of the carboy.
After racking, the fermentation restarted, so we will not finish the other steps as listed on the instructions until yeast completes its activity.
Hydrometer reading: 0.99 (target less than 0.995)
