First bottle

So I bottled my first wine a week ago. We decided to try it this weekend just to see. The taste is…well…different. It tastes like a dry, non sweet wine. It also has very little flavor from the peach fruit I chose. Did I do something wrong?

I also saw that the ingredient called for wine tannin but I never added this. When should it have been added to the wine?

Any help is greatly appreciated as I started blueberry wine last weekend.

Congrats on finishing your first wine. A few things you should consider on how to improve in the future.

First is bottle shock. When you bottle the wine, it will often undergo a temporary shift in the way it tastes. Within a month of bottling, it will get back to how it was before you bottled it, so after a week it will still have some of that shift. Be patient, it will evolve some.

Second. Dry fruit wines often don’t properly carry over the flavor of the fruit they are made from. Fruit is naturally sweet, and if you are expecting to taste that fruit (in your case peaches) it won’t taste like you are used to because the sugar is missing from your taste buds.

Third. Tannins are important in a wine. It gives the wine structure, making it less “juice” like and more like what you normally think of in a wine. It is generally added right at the beginning, even before the yeast. Just be careful to not add too much; in high amounts it can make a wine undrinkable (a mistake I made the first time I did a peach wine).

Fourth. It’s your first wine, and wine isn’t something that you can guarantee will work properly just from following a recipe. The fruit you use may be different than what was used by whoever made the recipe. Keep at it, read up on the process, and you will start to see what you need to measure during the process to adjust what you are doing for a particular batch. It will get better.

Good luck.