Grapefruit Wine Day 4: The many grapefruit rinds - plus peach wine update!

Jonee here. Sam's headed down to the big smoke for a few days and so I'm tackling the Grapefruit on my own this time. My turn I suppose. I've got a busy few days coming up, so I decided to knock out the potentially time consuming job of boiling the must, straining it (before adding the yeast this time) and then popping in the winemaking workhorse; the Yeast! - this time I'm using a 'Super Yeast' compound (mainly out of necessity, as Wilkinsons had run out of the regular wine yeast packets (is it me or are they running their stocks down? I hope they're still going to be getting home-brew products in) which is purported to aid clearing (making the finished product clearer) along with yielding a higher alcohol wine. This is only good news as far as I'm concerned! We're making wine after all, not fruit juice.

The purist in me would like to keep things simple and not use anything pre-made, but as I said, I didn't have much choice in the matter.

With the must boiled, strained and back in the fermenting barrel I decided to test the sugar levels using the hydrometer again. The sugar level was less than it had been when we tested it 4 days ago (it was now nearing the top of the blue 'Start Wine' band) which means that the wine would come out less alcoholic than we'd originally thought. I decided to add the remaining half bag of sugar to the mix and (almost on a whim) added about half a bottle of pure water to top the wine up to the 3 gallon mark. I'm not really sure why I did this, it just seemed cleaner somehow to have an exact amount of wine rather than something random. OCD? possibly. I tested the wine again with the hydrometer and it was acceptably close to the bottom of the blue band, indicating an ideal amount of sugar to be turned into a wine of reasonable potency.

I added the recommended amount of Pectolase (2 teaspoons) to the must (this is supposed to aid wine clearing also). This wine had better be CLEAR!

After it had cooled I added 3 heaped teaspoons of the 'Super Yeast Compound' as directed (1 heaped teaspoon per full gallon of wine must (this is probably why I felt compelled to engineer a round number earlier) and set the fermentation barrel to work under the stairs.

Temperature is a concern in the fermenting process, I hope it's warm enough for the little fellows to do their thankless work.

PEACH WINE UPDATE

While I was in the cupboard I pulled the Peach wine out and tested it with the hydrometer. It was out of the blue band

altogether and into the small red band above that, indicating that a lot of the sugar has been used up. It was reading about an S.G. (Specific Gravity) of 1.035 (remember that water has an S.G. of 1.00 and the larger the number, the denser/more sugary the solution is and therefore the lower down the hydrometer the reading will be. The target is to get the S.G. back to roughly a reading of 1.00 (the thick black line) Regardless of the maths involved, the hydrometer is showing that it's almost at the stage where it can be rated on a scale of sweet to dry. The longer you leave the yeast to do its thing, the more alcoholic it becomes, but also the dryer it is. Here's a hint; the wine can always be made sweeter later, but it can't be made more alcoholic, nor can it be made dryer, so we'll probably leave it to do its stuff for a good while yet.

In attempting to discover the alcoholic content of this premature batch of peach wine I refer to a formula that the wise wine lady gave us.
To figure it out accurately we would need the starting S.G. which we do not have, but I think we can assume that it was at least as low as the bottom of the blue 'Start Wine' band on the hydrometer, since we put in a similar amount of sugar as in the Grapefruit wine, only there was a lot less of the peach must. With that in mind we had a potential reading of 1.090 at the start (the bottom of the blue band) and a temporary end reading of 1.035.

So,

Start S.G. = 1.090
End S.G. = 1.035
means a drop of = 0.055

Here come the magic formula!

55 (divided by) 7.36 = 7.47% alcohol by volume.

At the moment the peach wine is at least 7.47% alcoholic by volume. I'm impressed so far, and will be following its progress with great interest! (to figure out the proof you need to multiply the 7.47% by 7-4ths. I don't know how to do this so I'll leave it to your capable brains)

P.S. even the wine lady didn't understand what the 7.36 (that you divide the S.G. difference drop with) represents. It's some mathsy/Sciencey thing that is better left to other, more capable people to think about. It works though. She assured us that it works.

Love you all.

Jonee.