Recipe; Roasted Green Tea & Ginger Wine

A bit slower in coming than i anticipated, but then you don't expect the spouse to get a broken finger. All is well with that tho so onwards with the wine talk!

Recipe:

For 3 gallons.

• 100g Roasted Green Tea (Bancha, yamamotoyama)
• 6 litres White grape Juice (Tesco, pure, not from concentrate)
• 100g Peeled, bruised and chopped root ginger.
• 3 Lemons (juice & zest)
• 2 Limes (Juice & zest)
• 2 teaspoons Tartaric Acid
• 1 Teaspoon Citric Acid
• 2.5 Teaspoons pectolase
• 1.5 teaspoons Nutrient (brupak, nutrivin)
• 1.9 kg Sugar
• 2.5 Campden tablets (crushed)
• water to 3 gallons.
• Sauternes Yeast

 OG 1072

Method;

Put the green tea in a muslin bag, add it to a pan of water and bring to the boil. Add the "tea" to your fermenting bin but keep the muslin bag of tea and then repeat.
While this is going on zest and juice the citrus, and bruise, peel and chop the ginger. Add to a muslin bag and put in the fermenting bin.
Add the sugar to a pan of water and dissolve, you may want to heat it it to speed up the proces, then add to the fermenting bin.
Add all your other ingredients, including the muslin bag of tea but not  the yeast and make up the volume to around 3 gallons.
Put a lid on it and leave it overnight.
Next day measure the gravity and adjust with more sugar solution or water until you get the gravity you desire. Make the volume up to around 3.5 gallons as you'll lose some volume when you remove the tea and zest etc, also when you rack. Then Add your yeast, stir sloshily to get some air into the liquid, tightly cover the fermenting bin and then stir sloshily once or twice daily for the next few days.

After 5-7 days remove the muslin bag of tea then transfer the fermenting brew to secondary fermentors (under airlocks). Leave the zest in if you like, but remove it a few days later. Leave it now until the wine finishes fermenting.  When it stops fermenting do all the usual stuff like degas, stabilise, rack.

Discussion

A cheerful disclaimer .. I've never made this wine before, tho i have made it's sibling Green Tea & Ginger. I have no idea what the roasting will do to the final wine, but if you want to experiment then don't wait for me to report back, just get cracking. The sibling tea is a belter tho, it goes so well with spicy food that that you'll wonder why you don't have white wine with curry all the time.

The other difference is that i have followed the quickie wine recipe (2 litres of juice per gallon of wine, and a low OG - 1070-1080). The reason for this is that i'm impatient to try it, and by doing it this way i should be drinking this wine september/october if all goes well.

UPDATE and sign off on this wine

It's March 2021 and i opened the last bottle of this wine. Pretty much a 10 year vintage. At less than 11% ABV it probably should not have been an uber vintage wine. However it was a pleasant surprise. It did need to breathe tho!

Cutting to the chase, it was a worthwhile experiment to lay this down and see what came about. It worked. Was it worth waiting 10 years? No, it did not transform the wine. However it was still a pleasant drink.  So, if you copied this wine don't lay it down for 10 years unless it's for your own journey of comprehending wine-making. Do things right and there is no reason why it won't turn out OK. But better to enjoy it sooner. There are wines you'll make that'll become magic from 10 years of conditioning. This is not one of them.