We're just finishing the last of our first Carafe 21 Red and Carafe 21 White kits. Both were very drinkable. The red definitely improved over the few weeks since bottling. We have about 1 bottle of each left.
Our second Carafe 21 Red will be bottled on Sunday evening. We stabilised it a couple of days ago and we'll be racking off tonight and adding the finings.
To help make the Carafe kits last this long, we've opened some of the raspberry wine. It is amazing! It tastes so much nicer than any shop bought wines and we're definitely going to make some more.
Raspberry wine 1 is very nice. It's fairly dry, with just enough sweetness. The raspberry flavour really comes through. It's mellowed a lot since we bottled it. If we had enough of it, I would drink it every day.
Raspberry wine 2 is very good too, but much sweeter than raspberry wine 1. It's more of a really good dessert wine. It's a bit too sweet to drink every night. It's really nice 50% wine and 50% soda water, still a good raspberry taste but not so sweet.
The reason raspberry wine 2 is sweeter than raspberry wine 1 is that raspberry wine 2 was made with currants, which have a lot more sugar than grape juice. That meant that raspberry wine 2 should have been left to ferment longer. Unfortunately, being beginners, we didn't think to test the SG before stabilising. But never mind!
It's been a really good learning experience for us and we've decided we like raspberry wine so much that we're going to plant more raspberries in our garden. We've picked and frozen a few pounds of home grown raspberries so far this year, so we can make a couple of gallons from that (probably with a mix of loganberries in there too).
But before I put any more raspberry canes in the ground, I need to crack on and get even more wines started ....
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