Grape juice wine experiment - Final alcohol levels and taste test results
Below are the alcohol readings for each bottle and taste tests after 11 days.
Bottle 1
The Final Gravity is 0.994 making the alcohol just over 6%. The smell is mild and the taste is somewhat sour.
Bottle 2
The Final Gravity is 0.995 making the alcohol level just under 6% alcohol. The smell is slightly fruity and somewhat sour in taste.
Bottle 3
The Final Gravity is 0.995 making the alcohol level just under 6% alcohol. The smell and taste are slightly sour.
Bottle 4
The Final Gravity is 0.994 making the alcohol level just over 6% alcohol. The smell has a hint of grape soda aroma but the taste is slightly sour.
PH ranges were between 3 and 4. This was as close as my test strips could accurately show.
Final thoughts:
I am unsure at this point if the wine has been contaminated with Acetobacter bacteria which will turn wine into vinegar and creates a sour taste or this is just from the ascorbic acid that was in the grape juice to begin with. Wine generally doesn't taste very good right after being brewed so I will leave these to age and retry them in a month or two.
I think I am going to reduce the time to 2-3 days of the open air cap down from 4-5 days to reduce the chance of Acetobacter contamination.
All bottles fermented below a gravity reading of 1.00 so I would consider them all fully brewed. Bottles 3 and 4 seemed to slow and stop bubbling 1-2 days before the others but the improvement wasn't significant.
I would have to say the clear winner in flavor is bottle 1 that didn't have any additional ingredients added to it. Bottle 4 had a nice grape soda smell but the taste didn't match the smell. The bentonite definitely dropped out some of the color and other smell components to it to the bottom as can be seen with the darker sediment compared to the other bottles.
Join me for my next experiment as I'll do a comparison between adding sugar (sucrose), inverted sugar (table sugar boiled to break down the sucrose into glucose and fructose) and dextrose which is glucose. This next experiment should produce I higher alcohol content similar to store bought wine. Cheers!