Home › Wines, Champagne and Doctoring › How to Ripen Wine

How to Ripen Wine

nin. He recommended the use of one pound of the bruised berries of the mountain ash in a somewhat unripe state, well stirred in each barrel of the wine to be improved. After agitation, the wine is to be left to repose a day or two, and then racked off. The tannin in the berries by this time will have separated and precipitated the glutinous matter from the liquid, and removed the ropiness. Wines effected with this malady cannot be fined in the regular way as they do not contain sufficient of the astringent principle to cause the coagulation or precipitation of the finings; this principle must therefore be supplied, and for pale white wines, which are the ones chiefly attacked with ropiness, nothing equals a little pure tannin or tannic acid dissolved in proof spirit. Red wines contain so much tannic acid that they are never troubled by ropiness. Wine after having been cured of ropiness should immediately be fined and bottled. How to Ripen Wine.

Dealers adopt various ways to hasten the ripening of wine. One of the safest and best plans for this purpose, especially for strong wines, is to let them remain on the lees fifteen or eighteen months before racking off, or, whether "crude" or "racked," keeping them at a temperature ranging between 50 and 60° Fah., in a cellar free from draughts, and not too dry. Dealers sometimes remove the bungs or corks, and substitute bladders fastened air tight. Bottled wine doctored in this way and kept at about 70° Fah., ripens very rapidly. Four or five drops of acetic acid added to a bottle of some kinds of new wine, immediately gives it the appearance of being two or three years old.

If newly bottled wine be exposed to the sun, it will