Queen Anne's Lace Wine

Post date: Aug 24, 2012 1:39:11 AM

Another interpolated recipe. Started from Garey's generic flower wine recipe, and used some steeping information from a web recipe for Queen Anne's Lace jelly.

6 oz (about 6 packed cups) QAL flower heads

3 lbs sugar

1 tsp yeast nutrient

1/8 tsp tannin

1-1/2 tsp citric acid

3/4 tsp malic acid

3/4 tsp tartaric acid

1 Campden tablet

1 tsp champagne yeast

Rinse flower heads in cold water to remove copious numbers of ants. Pour 1 quart of boiling water over the flower heads, bring to a simmer, turn off heat, and let steep for 15 minutes. Pour over sugar to dissolve and let cool. Put into sanitized 1 gallon carboy. Top off with water and 1 crushed Campden tablet. Put on airlock and leave overnight.

8/23/12 6:30PM

Started

8/25/12 11:30A

Pitched yeast after about 14 hours (a whole packet of Lalvin Champagne yeast). Fermentation is going nicely - a kind of scum formed on the surface first, reminiscent of what you get on beer when it's starting. It smells quite nice, actually - none of the vegetable aromas I was getting when I made it.

8/29/12 2PM

Still fermenting. Racked. Tastes nice, very sweet, even though the yeast has been bubbling away intensely for several days now.

9/22/12 10AM

Racked.  Wine is much clearer.  The color is hard to describe.  Orangey pink, maybe.  Still very sweet, and seems to make my jaw numb when tasting.  The fermentation may be stuck. I will add some yeast nutrient and see if it restarts.

9/24/12 7AM

No sign that the fermentation has restarted.  Maybe there was just an awful lot of sugar. I didn't measure the SG on this wine for some reason.  It was 360gm/L, which implies a SG of 1.120 - which would be - yikes! 16.58% alcohol.  Ok then.  I put in too much sugar...

10/10/12 5PM

Racked and tasted. Much improved.  Still sweet, but not cloying.  Appropriate for a dessert wine.  I'm going to bottle this in small bottles, I think.

11/12/12 10AM

Gravity is still at about 1.050. Is this stuck?

11/14/12 8AM

Added 1tsp yeast nutrient

11/17/12 1PM

Racked while aerating and pitched 1/2tsp Lalvin K1-V1116 to try to restart the fermentation.

11/23/12 4PM

This wine is driving me crazy.  Measured gravity - 1.052 at 66 degrees F (went up?  Maybe it's all the floating yeast - now we are at about 9.3% alcohol).  No sign that the fermentation restarted - so I very vigorously splash racked - poured from great height into a funnel, shook it, etc. to try to get as much air as possible into the must (much more effort than I took on the 17th), and added 1/2 tsp yeast energizer.  This wine so far defies any attempts to get it going again...

1/27/13 12PM

Racked and stabilized.  FG is 1.050.  So that's it then.  Done.  I will fortify this and make it a dessert wine, and learn to properly oxygenate my wort in the future.

2/1/13 All day

Tried cold crashing by putting in bulkhead (about 30 degrees) for 8 hours or so.  No visible improvement in clarity.

2/2/13 9AM

Racked and added 1/2 tsp of bentonite in about 2 oz of water. Put in bulkhead (around 30 degrees), stirring occasionally, as per the tips given here.

2/6/13 4PM

Racked off bentonite - wine is very clear now.  Added 8 oz of grain alcohol, which should bring the ABV from 9.6% (based on FG of 1.050) to 14.6%.

2/13/13 5PM

Bottled into 10 375ml's.  Looks nice, tastes good.  A long journey on this one...