Certainly the finest wine I’ve made so far… I am writing this post while enjoying the glass you see in the picture. This nearly perfect “Nectar of the Gods” is from a simple store bought kit, but no other kit provides such a bang for the buck. This wine weighs in at not even $3 per 375mL bottle! Any icewine from the store is gonna set you back $30 to $100 per 375mL! Living in PA and travelling to Niagara-on-the-Lake quite often, I’ve sampled the regions best (Joseph’s and Pillitteri’s) and I must say this kit wine is quite good with respect to commercial, award winning icewines.
Fermentation started strong and proceeded as would be expected for a kit wine. Time was up from their suggested 28 days, although that is very normal. All in all, from day 1 to bottling was only 7 weeks. I made a solid 3 gallons with no topping up (due to the addition of an F pack.) Although not exactly needed for this specific kit wine, I am sure to try these extended instructions for kit wines as found on Jack Keller’s site (originally by Ed Goist) for the next kit I make.
As for tasting… The wine is best served chilled and is clearly more viscous than a typical Riesling and leaves obvious legs on the glass. Some say this wine is meant to be enjoyed young. Far be it from me to not listen to those people! I will save a few bottles for longer term aging (a few years). Final gravity ended up at 1.060 which lets us know exactly how sweet this wine is. It is nowhere near cloying however, as the alcohol and acidity round out everything perfectly. If I had to nail down a taste, I would say apricot with honey, with a slight finish of apple possibly. I love a young, hearty cab as much as the next guy, but this wine is simply fantastic. I will start another kit the minute I see I am down to a few bottles left!
I highly recomend this kit to anyone out there. It provides an extraordinary dessert wine for a very reasonable price. I have meandering about in my little head an idea of how to make an icewine-style wine from Welch’s concentrate and I will certainly post that when my experiment begins. My glass is empty, which means… Time to wrap this up and head to the bar another glass!
Notes from What’s Brewing Now page:
Riesling Ice Wine (from a kit)
- 3 gallon batch
- Completed “Step 3″ Clearing and Stabilizing on 5/11/2007
- Allow a couple more weeks to settle before bottling
- 5/20/2007 - Settling and clearing well. A nice 1 inch bed of lees has formed and you can see the wine is becoming clear.
- Moved carboy to basement where it’s a little cooler. Disturbed lees a little but they have since settled again. I will be bottling this soon. I had considered adding SuperKleer to get a little more polish but I may skip that.
- 6/27/2007 - Enjoying a glass as I write this. Wrote a whole post about this kit. Be sure to read it. The wine is a WINNER.
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