[ralph]

So i made my first wine that wasn't from a kit about 2 months ago, it was just a welches style country wine. I did add blue berries and black cherries to the must. It hadn't even started to drop any sediment as of a week ago so i threw some clarifier in. Now there is about an inch of sediment but the wine is completely hazy and not even starting to drop that after a week. i went back to the recipie and my notes and realized i threw in the pectin enzyme but didn't wait for 12 hours before throwing in the yeast, just threw it in after stirring up the must. from what i've read that will pretty much negate the effects of the enzyme.

So after i threw in the clarifier the next day i threw in a little more enzyme. It is hard to tell if it's doing anything. Honestly if it's hazy i'll chalk it down as a noobies mistake and bottle it and check on it in a few months. How long would you all wait before you just said, i guess i've got hazy wine?

[deb_rn]

Drink it... QUICK... and no one will know. Taste is the important thing... and learning is second!! I'm sure someone here will help you figure it out!
Good Luck!

Debbie

[WayneC]

If you try to clarify (like with Super kleer) when there is too much sediment it can not complete the job. You should always rak a few times and get it down to a hazy state before you try to clarify or you will end up doing it twice. At least that's what I do .... good luck

Wayne

[Iowa Guy]

Ralph - if it were my wine I would put the carboy away for a few months and then check on it again. Most of my country fruit wines are also cloudy at 2 months. I usually leave mine in the carboy for around a year to drop out most of the sediment before I bottle. In my opinion, patience is your best friend in this hobby...

Best of luck,
Iowa Guy

[Wade's Wines]

Iowa Guy's right. Give it a few months, rack again, repeat every few months. If it's not clear in a year then try something like fining agents or filtering. I think it will clear just fine on its' own in time.
Deb's also right. If it tastes good now and you want to drink it, dim the lights and you'll never notice the haze!

[Jack Keller]

Ditto what Wade and IG said. I'd like to add a few additional comments as well.

You are expecting scratch wines to act like kit wines. They don't. The concentrates and juices found in kits are processed before they are packaged and almost all kit manufacturers have you mix Bentonite in the must early on to force-clarify the wine. You are doing the processing in wines made from scratch, and if you don't add the Bentonite up front you will not see a similar result.

Considering the specific fruit you used and the fact you didn't use a lot of it or heat it, a pectin haze is unlikely. Just give the wine time.

Finally, opaqueness, cloudiness and haziness are not the same things. All wines are opaque while fermenting. Billions of yeast cells make it cloudy, but the billions of microscopic bubbles of CO2 they emit refract light and cause the liquid to go opaque. Once yeast end their vigorous fermentation phase, the yeast cells lose the bouyancy and refractability the CO2 provided and start to settle and lose that opaqueness, but millions of them persist as suspended matter and continue to create a cloudy condition for some period, which can be short or long. If alcohol toxicity is reached, the cells die off wholesale and you see the phenomenon known as "falling clear." The cloudiness just drops and settles into a layer of lees, leaving the wine above clear but possibly hazy. The haze can be pectin, starch or metal casse. It may clear up on it's own, but more likely than not it needs a catalyst. A catalyst is anything that initiates or causes a reaction to occur. It could be an enzyme, a reagent or simply a small amount of already brilliant wine.

The important message I am trying to convey is to first of all don't compare apples and oranges. Scratch wines and kit wines are very different and behave dissimilarly. Second, pectin hazes only occur under certain conditions. If you don't meet those conditions you shouldn't get a pectin haze. Finally, all wines go through specific phases and display corresponding optical characteristics. Learn them and you won't panic when things are within normal boundaries.

[ralph]

thanks everyone. i just started reading THE HOME WINEMAKERS MANUAL by LUM EISENMAN so hopefully that will also help me learn a little bit more so that my expectations don't rely along the lines of Wine Kit expectations. Will do as you all say and give it more time... Geez, and i thought i needed patients with Wine Kits, now i'm gonna have to buy some more smaller carboys for more experiments while this one ages away, thanks a lot