Our jelly making only used a small portion of the pomace we collected from the bladder press at Tin Lizzie Wineworks on Saturday. We collected two more containers of pomace on Sunday. With all this pomace and a little research, we decided to make a second run wine, something that we have not done before.
I read about second run wine and was expecting a light red wine that didn’t have much flavor. On the other hand, our pomace was from grapes harvested from the Stagecoach Vineyards in Napa Valley. That region experienced a wonderful grape growing season. So a second run wine with excellent grapes shouldn’t be all that bad. The research I had done stated that with excellent grapes, a second run wine should be better than most wine kit wines.
We emptied two buckets, about eleven gallons into a 20 gallon fermentation bin. To the pomace we added six gallons of sugar water that measured 25 brix. We also added some yeast nutrient. The mixture took off fermenting and the brix level was down to four brix the next day. On Sunday, with two other buckets of pomace we added sugar water to two seven gallon fermentation bins and added the pomace. It too took off and began fermenting rapidly.
By Monday, with Hurricane Sandy bearing down on us, we pressed the must from the twenty gallon fermenter. We were able to fill one and 2/3 three gallon carboys. We took some of the wine from the two other fermentation bins to fill the remaining 1/3 of the carboy. We then placed the remaining must into the empty 20 gallon fermentation bin since the smaller bins kept overflowing.
The wine in the two carboys continues to ferment. Both carboys measured about 1 Brix. I also added some tartaric acid to each carboy. Since we expected a pale red wine, we were surprised to observe that the wine had the same color as the wine jelly we made. It is a dark purple to almost black color. For now, we’ll let it stay in the carboy for awhile and rack to another carboy after the sediment builds up on the bottom. We are anxious to discover if this second run wine is any good.
Cheers,
Terry
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