Apple wine, especially if you've fined and filtered it, doesn't have a
strong apple aroma or taste. All that clarification and racking will leave
you with a white wine that tastes, well, pretty much like a white wine.

Back in my early winemaking days in the 1990's, we had a big ole winesap
apple tree in the back yard which had lots of apples. I picked up the
windfalls, actually cut them by hand and ran them through a juicing machine
skins and all (it was a lot of work), bumped the sugar way up, and made a
fairly dry wine (a little residual sugar) that I racked only twice and added
no finings. This made a moderately oxidized, rough wine ... but you know,
we enjoyed it, and it definitely had some "apple character."

In 2003, on the other hand, we made some wine from cider, fined it with
PVPP, and ended up with something very much like a nice german white wine
.... very nice chilled, you'd never know an apple had been involved. It was
particularly good because the cider was from a produce stand where they had
made it from a blend of a bunch of different apples.

One thing you can do to give your wine a bit more "apple" character is bump
up the malic acid content (malic acid tastes a bit "appley") ... acid blend
is generally one third malic acid. To preserve the apple flavor, fine less,
rack less, and definitely avoid a MLF. You could add some apple flavoring
at the end, but in my opinion that's cheating ). Better is to reserve
some of the unfermented apple juice, let it settle/clarify in the fridge if
it's cloudy, and add that to the wine prior to bottling (make sure to add
potassium sorbate to prevent fermentation for restarting in the bottle).

The final thing you should ask yourself is if you'd rather be drinking hard
cider, and if that's the case, look into making that instead of apple wine.

Jon
[Check out my winemaking homepage
http://users.rcn.com/jcgilliam/Southeast_PA_Winemaker/!]



"Charles E" > wrote in message
...
> Please allow me to beat my apple wine dead horse once again:
>
> This is my first time to try apple wine. The wine has now clarified
> and willl likely be bottled after a few more weeks of cold
> stabilization. Problem is there doesn't seem to be much apple
> character at this point in the process. I can barely detect any hint
> of apple in the aroma or taste. Is this temporary or par for the
> course with apple wine?
>
> Thanks,
> Charles