Scorching wine?

[bigadz]

So I've had gifted to me 2 demijohns of decent enough wine from the olds to turn into "grappa" (which I've explained it won't be but whatever :angry-banghead: )

I ran 25L to see what would come out as a product, 5 plates, no neutraliser, 30mins reflux before bleeding fores off, and I gotta admit it smelt burning.

I used 1 x 2400w element at 100% power for this and controlled take off with reflux condenser. End product carried over some flavour but it did have a bit of an off taste as far as my taste js concerned, which is probably garbage as I'm still relatively new to this.

Is burning wine a thing? Do I need to adjust how I heat this thing up? Also if I wanted to get the best taste out of this product what's the ideal set up? Run it strip and spirit run in pot still mode? Reflux with less plates?

Cheers.