I guess it's a particular problem with citrus which has a bitter taste in the zest. Mostly make wine out of grapes and keep the zest in sometimes for years and it has no impact.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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I've been reading up on this. It seems when it comes excessive bitterness in food, there are a few strategies.
A couple of them are an obvious no go, like using fats or dairy. Then are plenty of advice to spice up to hide the bitterness, dunno if that is really appropriate either unless hot spicy chili wine becomes a thing.
A viable route might be that the bitter flavor can be reduced due to how human tastebuds perceive or prioritize by either making it more sweet or sour.
Finally, bitterness can come from alkaline pH, which I guess is why making it more sour might work, but both my chemistry (and biology) fu are shamefully weak. Interestingly one recommendation is to add baking soda to the overly bitter dish, but reading up on baking soda, it has a bitter taste itself due to being alkaline, so it sounds weird.
My plan now is to make a couple of testers with non fermentable sweetener and lemon juice, let them rest for a while and see if any of them seem worth it to try rescue the rest of the batch.
Any thoughts or comments?
I've no experience on wine, but I can tell you I've once messed up the amount of citrus peel extract (just some dry citrus peel macerated in whiskey) I added to a beer and it was mostly undrinkable. The citrus peel bitterness did not go out after about 2 months and it was quite unpleasant. Ended up dumping the rest of the bottles. That particular batch also finished quite high on gravity, and I blamed it on adding the extract in primary fermentation.
I'd be curious if you're trying to age it, though, maybe something will happen after a longer while?
If all else fails, you could use it as cooking wine, I guess.
It's a small batch, so maybe I'll just save a couple of bottles and let them sit in some dark corner until I forget all about them and when I find them in some distant future it will be a surprise either way 🙃
There are lots of bittering compounds and best bet for you is some kind of sweetening it. Because they didn't dissipate by ageing.
Maybe look into artificial sweeteners -combinations of them mask each other bitter after taste. But it wouldn't be exactly natural.
Quick search pointed me to some paper about how to prevent it in juice and lots of papers about medical use.
Main compound that may be your problem is limonene (Wikipedia has good article) but I can't tell how to get it out.
Thanks. That's a bit discouraging that it will not dissipate.
But it just hit me now - maybe I could embrace the bitterness somehow instead. Like, figure out how to make a proper bitter, something related to a Fernet-Branca, but wine.
It will probably need to be stronger so it is more aperitif. So maybe little bit of some sort of "moonshine" (it is legal in my country to make some distillates) and sugar and drink it.
I did some sort of this few times mostly by maceration of fruits and herbs.
That's true. Distillation is illegal here in Sweden, and honestly it's too much of an effort for me personally anyway. So I'm thinking if I could build upon this into an interesting bitter brew of some sort, I could always mix it with vodka before bottling like when you make a liqueur.
I'd much appreciate any experience or recipes for herbs and methods if you'd like to share.
I tried to make some liqueur with currants and wine and it was disaster so not much help with that.
Now I usually let them sit in some "slivovice" for half a year and have much better results.
I had a plum wine which was quite bitter. Sweetening it helped a bunch, so that's my recommendation 🙂
Thanks!