The Hydrometer and how she is used

The hydrometer is one of the most critical pieces of equipment for wine making. It measures the sugar content in the "must" - the pressed grape due prior to fermentation - allowing the wine maker to predict and if necessary influence the level of alcohol in the final product.

When I originally used the internet to look up information sources on the hydrometer, I found that many different scales of measurement are used. On top of this, descriptions of wine-making in English often use Imperial measurements - and obviously in Hungary we don't!  So although the basic principle of the hydrometer is very simple, it took a bit more reading than I expected to get a full understanding of its usage.

This most excellent page gave me quite useful information on how to use the hydrometer, although since this page is based on imperial measurements and specific gravity, neither of which our hydrometer uses, I had to do some mental adjustments to take it all in.  Luckily there is a conversion table.

Our hydrometer is shown below, after we pressed the white grapes and then the red. It shows a sugar level of about 18 for the white must, and 19 or so for the red must. An ideal level for the fermentation process is around 20 to 21.  The reason grapes are left as long as possible on the vine before picking is to naturally maximize the sugar level. This summer was very sunny so most people picked the grapes a little earlier than last year.

  

Now a bit of technical stuff...

The Hydrometer works on the Archimedes principle that a solid suspended in a fluid will be buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced. Thus, the lower the density of the substance, the further the hydrometer will sink.

Hydrometers are used in fields other than wine-making, with varying measurement scales.  In wine-making alone, there are at least 3 scales used.  In English-language information sources, "specific gravity" is most commonly used. Our hydrometer - apparently the common type in Hungary at least in amateur wine-making - is based on the Brix scale. Degrees Brix (°Bx) is a measurement of the dissolved sugar-to-water mass ratio of a liquid. A 20°Bx solution is 20%, with 20 grams of sugar per 100 grams of liquid. Or, to put it another way, a measurement of 20°Bx means 20 grams of sucrose and 80 grams of water in 100 grams of must.

Applying this in practice,  the measurement we collected from the white must was 18 degrees.  We added sugar to bring it up to an optimal level of 20-21 degrees for making this white wine.  In the above-mentioned page about the hydrometer - which uses Specific Gravity rather than Brix scale - 18 degrees brix corresponds to 1.075sg, and 21.4 degrees brix corresponds to 1.090sg. That source says that fermentation ideally starts around the 1.090sg level.

A factor to consider is "potential alcohol", meaning the potential alcohol level of the finished wine after the yeasts convert all the sugar to alcohol.  18 degrees brix corresponds to a potential alcohol level of 10.2%, 21.4 degrees brix corresponds to 12.2% alcohol.  This is a desirable level for a white wine. For contrast, a dessert wine would target something more like 16%.

Since in both cases our sugar levels were good, but too low, sugar (just regular table sugar) was added to bring it up to the ideal level of about 20 to 21 for the fermentation process.

One final thing. In the pictures of the hydrometer above, you can see "20°" written on it. To confuse matters further this is nothing to do with the sugar level but rather the optimal temperature of the must when the hydrometer is used. That is, the hydrometer is calibrated based on a must temperature of 20° - so if the temperature is significantly different, then one needs to make manual calculations to determine the actual sugar level.  It's unlikely that our must was 20° when we measured the sugar levels, but no-one seemed to care. In any case, the amount of added sugar was also based on quick mental calculations - so for an amateur wine it seems not to matter too much.  I guess the pros take it more seriously!

Chemicals

Everyone seems to uses chemicals on their vines and other fruit trees to ward off fungicide and pests.  If one questions this, the response tends to be a bit dismissive. On the other hand, in Hungary there are a number of Organic/Bio wine producers. It would be nice to get rid of these chemicals some time in the future, even if it means a somewhat reduced crop.

 

Disinfecting barrels using sulphur

When I posted about racking the barrels, I mistakenly wrote that burning the sulphuric strip ('Kénlap') inside the barrel, prior to putting the wine back in, was to clear the oxygen out.  I hadn't been sure about that, and subsequently read that it is actually to disinfect the barrel.

The image below from bkwine.com shows what the pros use - a wooden plug with an iron wire attached, that is used to burn sulphur pellets inside the barrel.  This seems safer than the method we used - attaching the sulphuric strip to a piece of wire and lowering it in and out again with great care not to drop it into the barrel - because if that happened it would be a nightmare to get it out!

Next racking will be in January. Until then, nothing much to do except enjoy the new wine. Luckily, the time of year for mulled wine is now upon us.  Since the white wine is not as good the red, I think we'll be mulling over that...

borkő

While we were rolling the barrels back into position, before siphoning the wine back in, I heard a noise like there would be a fragment of metal rolling around inside the barrel.  Sanyi said it was "borkő".  Although I didn't know exactly what this is, I got the idea, since it literally translates as "wine-stone" (and I knew vizkő - which literally translates to water-stone - means calcium).  So I guessed it must mean something that crystallizes from the wine.

I looked it up later and it means "tartar" in English, used in cooking as "cream of tartar". Technically, Potassium Bitartrate. This crystallises in wine casks during the fermentation of grape juice.  It is a product of Tartaric Acid which is the most plentiful acid found in grapes. This chemical is relatively rare in other fruits and is one of the keys to the suitability of grapes for winemaking.

You can sometimes find it in bottles too.

St Marton's Day and 2009 újborok

On St Marton's Day, when Goose is the traditional thing to eat, we went to Borbíróság for dinner. Given that just last week we had tasted our own 2009 for the first time, a nice attraction on the menu was the 5 "újbor" - just released 2009 wines. 


We tried both reds and one of the rosés.  From the reds, I preferred the Vylyan Bogyolé. It's name means "berry juice" and is a clever play on the word Beaujolais as it's made in the style of Beaujolais Nouveau - it was smooth and more full bodied than the drier "Bock Szent Márton bora". It was also more similar in taste to our own homegrown red (which doesn't do so badly in comparison in my humble opinion!!!)  


The "Dúzsi Tamás Primőr Rosé" was also delicious - very fruity.


And we had some very tasty goose too!  Their Márton Napi menu (pdf file) is available for a week or so.

Racking

Finally I've got something to write about again!

Yesterday we racked the barrels, and hurrah, the wine is somewhat drinkable. I wasn't expecting that so soon, making it was a nice surprise, even if it needs more time to become clear and develop some character.

Racking in Hungarian is "féjtes", which might be related to the word for head, "fej", as racking involves separating the good wine off the top of the barrel from the sediment,or lees (üledék in Hungarian), at the bottom.  If the wine is left too long on the lees it can develop an off-taste. The phrase "sur lie", which one might encounter for example on a Muscadet bottle, translates from the French as "on lees", meaning a wine bottled directly from the barrel without racking, which gives a distinctive yeasty aroma and taste.

I travelled down in the rain to Siófok, dropped off one of the daughters at the grandmother and headed off to meet Sanyi Bácsi at the cellar.

Sanyi had already been there a little while. With the help of another man who had been there earlier, he had siphoned off the red wine into a large plastic container (a lot larger in practice than it looks in the picture below!) and thrown out the gunk - the sediment, - that had accumulated at the bottom.

 

Together we washed out the barrel. Or to be more accurate, Sanyi did the hard work and I carried the buckets. This was slow. It involved pouring in a bucket of water, plugging it up, rolling and shaking the barrel around for a minute or two, then draining out the water. And doing it again and again, until the water came out reasonably clear.

Next, turn the barrel upside down and let the remaining water drip out. And wait for the barrel to get dry.

While waiting, we moved onto the next barrels.  Luckily the first barrel was dry by the time we needed the first large plastic container again to drain off the third barrel, as we had only two such containers.

Once the barrel was dry, the next step was to put Kénlap (a sulphuric strip) on a piece of wire, set it alight, lower it into the empty barrel, push in the bung quickly, and wait until it had burned off before removing the bung again.  The stink this gave off was overwhelming and made us cough. Healthy work...

The purpose of this step is to remove oxygen from the barrel, so the wine won't oxidise after it is put back in.  As the wine is put back, the gas comes out.

   

Once that was done, we could finally siphon the wine back again into the barrel from the plastic container, and the first barrel was finished.

Having missed out on draining the first barrel, when we started on the second, I discovered that this step is quite time-consuming too. It's because the plastic containers are in the "présház" on a higher level than the cellar. So while it's easy to siphon back from the containers into the barrel, it's obviously not possible in the 'up-direction'.

So, we siphoned the wine from the barrel into buckets with a length of hose pipe, quickly swapping the buckets when they filled up. While one of us was doing the siphoning, the other was carrying up the buckets and emptying them out into the plastic container. But that was the easy part, because at some point the flow from the hosepipe becomes too slow. Then we had to take out the bung from the front of the barrel and let the remainder flow out. This isn't so easily controlled as siphoning, so we had a row of buckets ready, and quickly filled them up one after the other, until the barrel was empty.

As the bottom of the barrel is reached, the wine becomes cloudier. The last bucket of all is a murky mud-like gunk. I was surprised how horrid it looked, having expected something more like the sediment that collected at the bottom of the must when we pressed the grapes! The lees consists of deposits of dead yeast or residual yeast and other particles, as well as the sediment from the grapes.  The pictures below shows how delightful the lees looks!

 

So on we went with this process until the three barrels were finished. They will sit there to let the wine clarify and we can repeat the process until the wine is crystal clear.

The 105 litre barrel on the left is full to the brim with all our red; the next one - 200l - is full with white; and the last one - 300l - is not quite full.

The wine is drinkable, although further settling and racking is needed to clarify it, and develop its taste.  The white is a bit acidic unfortunately.   The red is quite alright - albeit lacking any depth or character.

So, a few takeaways:

And in the picture below you can see how cloudy the white is.  I don't know how alcoholic is the wine, although probably the majority of the sugar has turned to alcohol. I wanted to use the Hydrometer to test the sugar level but I was told it only works on the must ... not sure about this because it contradicts with what I read.  Anyway, I guess I'll just have to drink a litre and see how I feel afterwards :-)

Theory vs practice

One of the curious things that I still don't quite understand, is the difference between the actual process of wine making as I am seeing it, and the "theory" I read. This may be in part because a lot of the resources on wine making in the English language are about making wine from fruits other than grapes... not too surprisingly since I guess grapes are not as widely grown in family orchards in the English-speaking world as in mainland Europe.  And from what I've read, it seems that grapes are really the perfect fruit from which to make wine (surprise surprise)- to make wine from every other fruit requires addition of something to the process, e.g. yeast, and perhaps more attention to detail.

One example is sterilisation. I read that everything should be perfectly sterilised.  In practice nothing at all is sterilized, there were lots of flies around during the pressing stage, and most of equipment is hardly what one would call hygenic (in fact, best not to think about hygiene at all).  The assumption seems to be that anything nasty simply gets killed off during the fermentation, or removed during racking.

Another is keeping air and fruit flies away from the wine, to prevent oxidisation.  I read that it's critical to use airlocks that keep the air (oxygen) out from the wine but release gases from the fermentation (Carbon dioxide).  Well, perhaps it is, but we haven't used those yet. I think we should be, but the ones we had are old and cannot be cleaned. Nobody seems too bothered about it though, although I'd feel a lot happier if we would simply buy some new ones.  The hole at the top of the white wine barrels was just covered over for a few weeks, and now the bung has been put in... but only loosely.  The fruit flies do seem interested in the red juice I put into the plastic container - but not in the other wine in the barrels.

On the other hand, it can be that all this will produce a wine but not a terribly great one.

Well, let's see... this year is for learning and next year is when I would like to start experimenting.

2009 Vintage Expected to be Excellent

Time for a bit of mutual backslapping.  The most excellent Hungarian foodie site Chew.hu gave me a shout-out so I'm returning the favour.

Their article states that this year "Grape Production Down 10%" -- I have no idea -- and "2009 Vintage Expected to be Excellent" -- it bloody well better be!  Nice to know my 600 litres or so will form about .0002% of the national harvest of 300 million litres.

I'm a bit worried about the wine I put into the plastic container though. At the weekend the fruit flies were buzzing around the top of it, but not around the barrels oddly enough.

Volume of wine from the grapes

(Updated this post because my original arithmetic was wrong.)

The bath is approx 1.2m x .75m and the red grapes filled it to about .15m deep, maybe a little more.  That's a volume of .135 cubic metres.  That volume of liquid theoretically should result in 135 litres, or practically a bit less when the pulp is removed. And indeed the actual result was indeed something like 130 litres of juice!

The white grapes filled the bath to about .6m deep. That's a volume of .54 cubic metres, which is 540 litres. And the actual result was estimated around 500 litres.

The final quantity of wine will be a big less because the sediment will be removed in coming months by 'racking'.

Additive-free

Unlike the Hungarian "Winemaker of the Year 2005" I don't think we will be adding glycerol!

Red grapes pressed

After stewing in their own juices for a week the red grapes got pressed on Saturday.

The 'présház' was a pretty sight when I walked in - the 'muslicak' (fruit flies) had taken over, they were literally everywhere.  This won't affect the wine but it didn't look too pleasant.

I had to do the pressing on my own, and that wasn't a big deal - I'd seen how to use the press and had been told everything else to do.  My first task however was to fill the barrel with whatever juice had already come out of the grapes. Using a hosepipe running down from the bath this probably about half-filled the 105 litre barrel.

Next I assembled the press and threw in the grapes - they all fitted in so I had only one pressing to do.

As each bucket was filled it was poured using a funnel into the barrel.

All was fine until the barrel filled up and I moved onto the second barrel... and it leaked!  So instead I put the juice into a large plastic container for the time being. The first barrel now being full to the brim, meant I had to siphon some of it off into the plastic container - it's necessary to leave a good gap at the top of the barrel for the fermentation which needs air and will significantly bubble up.

I tasted the juice that came off from the grapes and amazingly after just one week in the bath it already tasted much more of wine than grape juice. (Some of the juice we had taken home after the harvest had also started to ferment in the fridge but it tasted quite different - like a fizzy fruit juice.)

As well as tidying and washing everything, I collected the dried-out grapes in a couple of containers - they will be just thrown back onto the soil. It would be possible to compost it but they don't.

Adding sugar to the must

In order to produce a good wine, the must needs to have an appropriate quantity of sugar; this gets converted to alcohol during the fermentation process.  If the natural grape sugars are not enough, sugar needs to be added. (To explain more what this means, I plan a subsequent post about the Hydrometer!)

In the case of the white grapes, the sugar level was a little over 18 degrees, whereas the desirable level is in the region 20 to 21 degrees. With the red grapes (which apart from being a different variety of course, sat two weeks longer in the sun before picking), the sugar level was a little under 20 degrees which is good but should be a bit higher. So in both cases some sugar needs to be added.

 

A rough estimate of the quantity of white must was 500 litres. And about 150 litres of red.

The magic formula (so I'm told) is that 1kg of sugar will increase the sugar level of 100 litres by 0.7 degrees.

The white must should be raised around 2 degrees to bring it close to 21. So let's the desired increase is 2.1 degrees (3 times 0.7). And it's 500 litres (5 x 100 litres). So 15 kg (3 x 5) of sugar was added.

With the red, I was told 4kg of sugar should be added. So 150 litres will have it's sugar level raised by about 2.6 degrees, with an end result around 22 degrees.  I was told this would make a semi-sweet red.  Now my personal preference is for dry reds, but this year is for learning so I don't want to interfere until I know what I'm talking about!

The red grapes are in...

At the weekend we picked the red grapes.  Unlike the the white grapes, which can be pressed immediately, the red grapes need to sit for a week before pressing. If they were pressed immediately a Rosé wine would be the result. We will return during the coming weekend to do the pressing.

Last time around we had a Scottish family living in Siófok helping out; this time the immigrant workers came from Ireland and Spain: my brother Gary and his partner Marta.

Child labour again too:

The crushed grapes look lovely:

The sugar level came to almost 20 degrees which meant that only a little sugar needed to be added to the 'must' to bring it up to the desired 21 degrees level.

Compare the colour of the red grape juice with that of the white two weeks ago!

 

Learning from the lesson of the white grapes, we took away lots of red grape juice to drink (about 15 litres) - perhaps a little too much because we have a lot less red than white and probably not enough to fill a barrel!

Off to drink some more now before it starts fermenting. A few more pictures here.

Must (grape juice)

The grape juice, "Must" in both Hungarian and English, is really really tasty!  We should have bottled more of it, but didn't have enough plastic bottles. Anyway, one must drink it within a few days before it starts to ferment.

I saw it selling in a cafe on the Ráday utca this week for 200Ft (60 euro cents) per deciliter.

The juice in the above picture was taken directly from the bath when the grapes were crushed by the mill, so it is quite cloudy.

The picture below shows the same jug, later on, after the remaining juice had settled. You can see how much sediment it contains.

The juice that came from the pressed grapes is a bit clearer, but still contains a lot of sediment which will be 'racked off' from the barrels in due course.

Pressing the grapes

After the grapes are picked they first go into the daráló (mill) which removes the stalks and squeezes them a bit.

The bath fills up with the yummy grapes...

Some of the juice runs out of the bath - either directly into the barrel ...

or into a bucket which is poured into the barrel...

Next the grapes are lifted from the bath into the press...

the top is put on the press...

the screw is turned ...

and the juice - called "must" in Hungarian - flows out into buckets, and it is poured into the barrels using a funnel.

Once no more juice can be obtained, the press is partially dismantled, the pulp is removed and dumped unceremoniously onto a tarpaulin on the ground.

After all the grapes have been taken from the bath and pressed, the collected pulp is scooped up and returned to the bath. It will sit there for about 3 days, after which it will be pressed again - a lot more juice comes out and this "second pressing" is better quality.

This is how the grapes look after the first pressing, they are far from being dried out:

The pressed juice turned out to have a sugar level of about 18 degrees.  That's reasonably good but since the sugar level determines the alcohol level in the end, it will need sugar added to bring it up to 20-21 degrees. I'll write about this in a follow-up post.