Apple Wine Where's The Character

Apple wine, especially if you've fined and filtered it, doesn't have a strong apple aroma or taste. All that clarification and racking will leave you with a white wine that tastes, well, pretty much like a white wine.

Back in my early winemaking days in the 1990's, we had a big ole winesap apple tree in the back yard which had lots of apples. I picked up the windfalls, actually cut them by hand and ran them through a juicing machine skins and all (it was a lot of work), bumped the sugar way up, and made a fairly dry wine (a little residual sugar) that I racked only twice and added no finings. This made a moderately oxidized, rough wine ... but you know, we enjoyed it, and it definitely had some "apple character."

In 2003, on the other hand, we made some wine from cider, fined it with PVPP, and ended up with something very much like a nice german white wine ... very nice chilled, you'd never know an apple had been involved. It was particularly good because the cider was from a produce stand where they had made it from a blend of a bunch of different apples.

One thing you can do to give your wine a bit more "apple" character is bump up the malic acid content (malic acid tastes a bit "appley") ... acid blend is generally one third malic acid. To preserve the apple flavor, fine less, rack less, and definitely avoid a MLF. You could add some apple flavoring at the end, but in my opinion that's cheating :o). Better is to reserve some of the unfermented apple juice, let it settle-clarify in the fridge if it's cloudy, and add that to the wine prior to bottling (make sure to add potbuttium sorbate to prevent fermentation for restarting in the bottle).

The final thing you should ask yourself is if you'd rather be drinking hard cider, and if that's the case, look into making that instead of apple wine.

Jon Check out my winemaking homepage