The wine grape harvest is well underway around here so it's time to experiment a bit.
Luckily I have some contacts so was able to collect 4 x 25 litre containers of white wine (Chardonay) to ferment. Juice straight out the back of the truck. How easy it was!
Back to the shed and measured the SG at 1.090, pH at 3.7 and temp 24deg C.
Made up 4 x premix of 10g of EC-1118 in approx 100ml each of the juice and water. Pitched the starter after about 10 minutes.
Started off steadily for the first 12 hours then literally took off. Luckily I had just enough air space to prevent overflowing.
The SG dropped to 1.055 after 2 days and it was still very actively fermenting. A day later and fermentation had slowed and the SG was 1.000 and no sweetness when tasted.
Will leave it to settle and clear a bit before running through the pot still. The plan is to do the four stripping runs and then a second run but will depend on how it comes out. I certainly want to retain the flavour.
If this comes out ok the next batch will be with red wine juice. Also have access to sugar plums which will be a bit more tricky handling the whole fruit.
I'll try and post some updates on how it goes.