You might not achieve perfection on the first try, but it’s certain that changing up your game can make a huge difference to your finished kit wine. What kind of difference? You can make a difference so big that when you’re done it might seem like a completely different wine altogether. When you know the secret, you’ll be able to take a drinkable red and make it a hulking monster of intensity, a rolling, majestic wine that countenances only slow considered sips. Tannin additions are the key. Kit wines are balanced to achieve drinkability as early as possible. Standard kits have an acceptable flavor profile in as little as two or three months and even the ultra-premium, single-vineyard, grapeskin-in kits are mostly drinkable in only a year, something unheard of in a flagship wine from a commercial winery, which might take three to five years to approach a drinkable state. One of the only ways to achieve this early drinkability is to trade it off by balancing the kits to low levels of tannin. Because tannin additions are made post-fermentation
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