In the third part of our article we will approach some basics on how to change the taste of your home made wine. There are three easiest ways of changing the taste of your product – stems, sugar and yeast.
Stems
The first experiment that you can try is to leave some stems while you crush the grapes. This usually raises the amount of tannin and eventually makes the wine rougher and maybe even bitter. So you need to be careful with this type of experimentation. The problem here is that the stems will affect the whole batch so, it is better to keep just a few stems and make an small experimental mash.
Sugar and Yeast
Lots of wine enthusiasts, who are more interested in wine quality rather than different tastes tend to use special wine yeast instead of leaving the whole process to the natural bacteria. If you want to experiment with special yeast you can easily purchase them somewhere, but don’t forget to wash the grapes and remove the natural bacteria before you add the yeast. Combining them usually results in wasted batches, because they will hardly work together, but rather form some unpleasant environment. Also for some yeast you’ll have to purchase additional ingredients for cleaning the wine from the remaining yeast. This whole process of course makes the results more stable, but it somehow kills the natural chemistry of the wine and makes it more of a product rather than a mystery. Anyway the choice is yours.
Sugar goes more as an addition to yeast, because most of the recipes recommend boiling the juice with sugar, which actually kills the natural bacteria. So there is no other way but to add special wine yeast. Some recipes also recommend adding sugar dissolved in water rather, this helps to skip the boiling part, but requires additional attention to the quality of the water. While the stems tend to make the wine drier, sugar is directly aimed at making the wine sweeter and therefore more a dessert wine. So these are practically two different approaches.
As for the proportions of sugar and yeast they will be usually shown on the yeast package and will depend from the amount and type of juice you have.
In any case all types of experimentation are recommended only with small amounts of wine, for example with a special 1 gallon bottle or few 1 gallon bottles. In this case most of the batch created by a 100% working recipe will be okay. Also don’t forget that any experiment can go wrong not because of the ingredients, so if you feel that everything was done right, but the experiment failed, you can try again with more serious precaution measures. Of course in time as you advance you will be also master blending of different types of wine and leaving them for secondary fermentation. But this is actually the most complex thing in the whole winemaking process and will require at least 3-4 years of winemaking experience and a deep understanding of wine types.
