Posts Tagged ‘pectic enzyme’

For me, learning about how to make wine just never stops. I can remember years ago, making my first wine from a kit and being amazed at the simplicity of home winemaking. Since those first days, I’ve gone on to make many different fruit wines, meads, and yes – the odd time I have made beer as well. My preference remains wine although a cold home brew is nice on a hot sunny summer day.

Today, I was browsing through Daniel Pambianchi’s book, Techniques in Home Winemaking, (my review of the book is here) when I came across a note I had made in it about bentonite. Daniel writes in his book:

“Bentonite inactivates enzymes, and specifically, it should not be used concurrently with lysozyme.”
~ Page 261

Up to this point in time, I’ve never used bentonite in any of the fruit wines I’ve made, but there could be a time when I will. This information was good to know because when you make wines from fruit that are high in pectin, you need to add pectic enzyme to the juice. As those who make jams and jellies will know, pectin is a gelling agent. It’s also present in fruit and when making wine, can cause a haze. Pectic enzyme therefore is used to breakdown pectin. It works quickly but often, a winemaker will add bentonite to the juice before beginning the fermentation process at about the same time pectic enzyme is added. So now we know that we should add the pectic enzyme first and wait a couple of days before the bentonite addition.

P.S. If you want to learn how to make wine other than simply from store bought wine kits, I highly recommend you get Daniel Pambianchi’s book.

Do you enjoy mysteries? Sometimes, I do. It is a mystery to me how this wine I started this evening will turn out. But from the taste of the juice, it just might be very good.

Sometime ago, I purchased what I thought were 2 lb bags of gooseberries. I bought 10 lbs in all, hoping to make some gooseberry wine similar to this one. Except, what I ended up with in those five bags was nothing like the gooseberries I used for that wine. I’m not sure what I have. They do have the appearance of gooseberries in shape. But they are a very dark colour. Darker than the purple gooseberries I’m familiar with. And they were of assorted sizes. The smaller ones looked almost like overly large currants. There were some that were sweet to the taste, and some that had that tart flavor I associate with gooseberries. The juice was a very rich purply red color. I think they might have been some variety of gooseberry that I’ve not seen before, but I can’t say for sure.

I had taken all the bags out of the freezer to make up a five gallon batch, and thought… “Well, what the heck. Let’s get at it.” I know that some people put all their fruit into a straining bag – I’ve done that as well, but sometimes I’ll just liquify the fruit in a blender. Which is what I did. I heated up some water and added sugar to the hot water, in one gallon batches. Added 2 1/2 teaspoons of pectic enzyme. The total amount of sugar I added was 5 KG or about 11 lbs. The starting SG was 1.104 – but that is not exact with some of the fruity bits floating around in there. By the time I had taken the SG, much of the bits had come to the top, so I was able to get a fairly clear sample of the juice to measure the SG.

Pitched some yeast – and let’s see what happens!