A few weeks ago I talked about how I was going to try to make a frugal version of R.J.  Spangles White Chocolate Port wine. Today I am going to give an update on that wine. A couple of weeks ago, the wine had cleared nicely and I racked it off the sediment. I took a PA reading and it was at 5% PA. That was sweeter than I had planned, but it tasted good. I added Chocolate and Raspberry flavoring to it and decided to give it some more time. Well it started fermenting again. I expected that since the sugar reading was so high. Now I am back to waiting for it to finish fermenting.

If I wanted to stop the fermentation now, I could try a couple of things. First, I could add Potasium Sorbate and Campden tablets to try and stop the fermentation. I don’t like to do that though because I haven’t had consistant results stopping fermentation early. The other option is to try and cool the wine to get the yeast to settle to the bottom of the carboy then rack the wine off the sediment. I have never tried this myself, so I don’t know how well it works to stop fermentation.

I just like to wait. Patience is a virtue in wine making. Sometimes a wine just needs time to do its thing. If it wants to start fermenting again while in the carboy, I will let it do that. I prefer to let my wines ferment to dryness. If it needs sweetened after the fermentation has completed, I will back sweeten the wine.

Remember, you can’t rush a good thing. Give the wine time to finish fermentation before you bottle the wine. Sometimes, after a racking, wine will start fermenting again, especially if there is residual sugar in the wine. This is normal and usually not something to worry about.

Relax, have some patience and remember; Good things come to those who wait!

Enjoy!

October 19th, 2009 | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off

Last Saturday we had wine class again at the Porter House Brew Shop. It was a good class with some new wine makers learning the basics. I always enjoy getting new people started in this hobby, and we will have some new wine makers now.
I made an Apple Wine for class that night and I tried a new recipe. Usually I make my apple wine from apple cider, but we did not get any apples from our trees this year. We had a late frost. I decided to buy some apples from the store and make apple wine with fresh apples. We used McIntosh and Golden Delicious apples for this recipe. I used 15 pounds of apples, 8 pounds of sugar, and 4 gallons of water for this batch. I added yeast nutrient, tannin, and acid blend. The complete recipe will be on my Wine Recipe Page so I encourage you to check it out. This is a perfect time of year to get apples, so give it a try.
Enjoy!

October 13th, 2009 | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off

I’ve been trying to grow wine grapes for years. I am still climbing the learning curve and Mother Nature likes to make it interesting, so I only got a couple of pounds of grapes this year. We had a late frost in my area, and my vines got hit pretty hard. I harvested 3 lbs of Catawba, and no Niagara this year.

Being the stubborn wine maker that I am, I decided to make wine out of my grapes. Now, 3 pounds of grapes is not a lot to work with, so I added 2 cans of frozen grape juice to the crushed grapes from my harvest. I added water to bring it to 1 gallon,then checked PA and acid. Acid was fine, PA was a little low, so I added 1 cup of sugar to bring PA to around 10%. I also added 1 teaspoon of yeast nutrient and 1 Campden tablet to the must. I will pitch yeast tomorrow.

I’ve made wine out of frozen grape juice before, so I feel pretty confident that I will have a drinkable wine when it is done. The fresh Catawba grapes should add their own flavors to the concentrate, so we’ll see how it turns out. I’m just kind of winging it with this recipe, but this is the Art part of wine making.

Which brings me to the lesson I want to leave you with today. After you understand the basics, don’t be afraid to experiment. Winemaking is part Art. We are trying to create something unique that we can share with others and enjoy ourselves. I grew these grapes, so I wanted to make wine from them. I added some frozen grape juice, got the numbers where they needed to be, and wha la, I have a gallon of grape wine being made.

Next fall, when I am harvesting next years grapes, I will open one of these bottles of wine, and enjoy it after the harvest. Hopefully I’ll be thinking, this is a great wine! This year I can make a full 5 gallon batch! Or I might be grateful that I have enough grapes to repeat this recipe. I don’t know for sure, but I am hopeful.  I just need Mother Nature to cooperate with this plan.

Enjoy!

October 5th, 2009 | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off

Last week I made a nice discovery in my wine cellar. I found a bottle of wine I did not know I had. I did not know I had it because it was labeled wrong. Here is the story.

Back in 2005 I made an Orange Wine. The recipe called for adding orange peels to the must. Well, I guess I added too many orange peels because that was all I could taste when the wine was done. I really don’t like orange peels, but I bottled it anyway, hoping it would improve with age.

Every so often, when the mood struck me, I would open a bottle of this Orange wine, taste it, and dump it down the drain. It was getting less worse (better) with each tasting, but not something that I liked.

Well last week the mood to try this wine struck me again and I selected a bottle from the cellar. Upon examining it, I noticed it looked kind of dark for an Orange Wine, since my Orange Wine was a white. Intrigued, I took it upstairs to see what happened to make it turn so dark.

Upon opening it, I was greeted with an nice dark red cork and the aroma of grape wine. Could this really be, I thought to myself. When I tasted it, my suspicions were confirmed, I had a 4 year old bottle of Concord Grape Wine! Oh I was so happy!

The 2005 Concord Grape Wine was one of the best Concords I have made. The growing season in my area was perfect. I had the vine pruned correctly. The grapes were very sweet and made an excellent wine. That was the first time I made a good Concord Wine and learned what this under-appreciated grape could produce under the right circumstances.

Needless to say, we enjoyed that wine.

I guess when I was labeling the Orange Wine, one of the Concord Wines got labeled with the Orange Wine label by mistake. I am glad for that mistake.

Let me leave you with a couple of thoughts because of this event. First, give your wine time to age. I am always pleasantly surprised by what a couple of years in the bottle will do for a wine. Second, if a wine is made correctly, but you just don’t like it, bottle some anyway. It will get better with age.

My first instinct was to throw out the Orange Wine. I’m glad I didn’t because if I had, I would not have had the opportunity to enjoy the 4 year old Concord that I did. That experience alone is worth the Orange Wine I do not like.

Enjoy!

September 21st, 2009 | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off

Last Saturday we started our wine making classes back up at Porter House Brew Shop. We made Elderberry wine. (Just follow the link for the recipe we used.) We had a good time learning about how to make home made wine.

One of the questions I had was how much air to leave in the top of the carboy. I like to keep my carboy’s filled up above the shoulder. I top off with spring water, others have used wine must or juice from what wine they are making at the time. Another option is boiled tap water.  Any of these are fine to top off a carboy.

All that being said, I’ve had carboys that have been filled slightly below the shoulder with no ill effects yet. Air in a carboy will increase the risk of contamination and oxidation of the wine. Contamination can occur from wild yeast or organisms getting into the wine and causing spoilage. Oxidation will give the wine a slight brown tint, and possibly some off flavors or odors. These conditions can be reduced if you add sulfite (Campden Tablets) at the beginning of the wine making process.

I use campden tablets in all my wine. I use them at the beginning of the process and I also add them after the wine is finished prior to sweetening my wine. This helps the wine keep from spoiling or oxidizing. If you don’t use sulfites in your wine, it is best to keep your carboys filled to the neck to minimize exposure to oxygen.

That is all I have today. We will be running wine making classes once a month on the second Saturday of the month at the Porter House Brew Shop. Please preregister so we know how many people are coming. I hope to see you there.

Enjoy!

September 14th, 2009 | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off

Today I am going to talk about how to sweeten home made wine. Most of my fruit wine finishes very dry. When a wine is too dry, the only thing I can taste is the acid in the wine. I like to bring the fruit flavor out even in my dry wines. I am going to explain how I figure out how much sugar to add.

First be sure your wine is finished fermenting! This is very important. If you add sugar to a wine that is not finished, it will start fermenting again. If it happens to be in bottles when it starts up, it will pop the corks.

Second, I always stabilize my wine prior to sweetening. I do this to stop any residual yeast from starting to ferment again. I stabilize by adding Sorbate K and Campden Tablets (Potassium Metabisulfite). These two added together will stop the yeast from regrowing when the sweetener is added.

Now for the process. I draw a 750ml bottle of wine from the carboy and divide it among 4 wine glasses. This will make the math easier. One glass will not have any sugar add. This is the control glass, so I can compare this to the sweetened wine. In each of the other glasses I will add sugar in 1/4 teaspoon increments. So in glass 1 I will add 1/4 teaspoon of sugar, glass 2 will get 1/2 teaspoon of sugar and glass three will get 3/4 teaspoon of sugar.

Then I taste each glass of wine. I taste just enough wine to get an idea of the flavor profile. After the first tasting, I will add another batch of sugar to the wine. Since I am testing 3 glasses of wine, each with sugar in 1/4 tsp increments, I will add 3/4 teaspoon of sugar to each glass. 1/4 tsp plus 3/4 tsp, give a glass with 1 ts of sugar. adding 3/4 tsp. to each of the other glasses gives 1 1/4 tsp and 1 1/2 tsp respectfully. I then perform the tasting of each of the sweetened glasses again. I make sure to clean my palate each time with water between tastings.

If the second round does not produce the flavor I want, I will do this process a third time. After I know how much sugar is needed to bring out the flavor of the wine, I can calculate how much sugar to add to the 5 gallon carboy. Since I did this with 4 glasses of wine from 1 bottle, it is easy to do the math.

For instance, if 1 tsp. of sugar is needed for a glass of wine, I know I need 4 tsp. for one bottle of wine.  There are 25 bottles of wine per carboy, so 4×25=100 tsp of sugar for 5 gallons. There are 48 tsp in a cup, so I add just over two cups of sugar. (Note: This conversion works with a full carboy. If your carboy is not full, then you need to add a little less sugar. Wine Making is part art, so it doesn’t have to be perfect.   )

That is how I determine how to sweeten a wine. I usually add just enough sugar to bring the fruit flavor out. But, if you prefer a sweeter wine, you can make that as well. That is the beauty of making you own wine!

Enjoy!

September 1st, 2009 | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off

It is Elderberry season and time to shuck Elderberries! I’ve been trying a new method to clean the elderberries that I am going to share with you. I also have information on shucking elderberries on my Elderberry Project page.

I love Elderberry Wine, but cleaning the Elderberries is time consuming. I’ve been trying to find new ways to improve the process. The most widely used way to clean Elderberries is to shuck them by hand, pulling the berries off with your fingers. This method produces Elderberries with very few stems. Stems give a bitter taste to Elderberry Wine so the less stems the better.

Freezing Elderberries is another way to shuck them. This method consists of putting the Elderberries, stems and all, in a bag or box and freezing them. Then a day or two later, shaking the bag or box to dislodge the berries from the stems. The up side is that it is quick. You can remove lots of berries from the stem in just a few minutes. The down side is that the berries have lots of stem parts in them. The stems will impart a bitter taste to wine. Also, once the berries are frozen, they are hard to work with because if they thaw slightly, they will burst, loosing their juice.

The freezing process seems most promising, so I am trying to improve on it. The two largest problems I encountered last year were stems in the elderberries, and the occasional bug or leaf. (Stink bugs are not good for wine!)

I addressed the leaf problem in the field by only putting elderberry pods in the bag. I cut the pod from the bush above the last leaf. Sometimes there are leafs close to the berries, I just remove them before putting the pod in the bag.

Next, I addressed the bug problem back at the house. The Elderberries are going to need washed at some point in the process. You need to get the bugs and other stuff off the berries before using them. I have a large wash tub in the basement, and this is where I washed the berries. I put them all in one side of the tub and sprayed them with water. I take the berry pods out one layer at a time and spray again. My goal here is to wash the bugs and dirt to the bottom of the tub.

Berries being cleaned

As I take them out of the tub, I lay them out on newspaper to get them the drip dry for a few minuets. (Five or ten minuets at the most) My goal here is to not have them dripping water at the next step, wet is OK.

Elderberry drying after cleaning

Next I cut the Elderberries off the pod into a bowl. I am trying to get most of the stem removed at this point, but not all of the stem. I’ll get to that later. There are usually 5 pods of berries on the stem. I was able to cut all five off at one time on most of the pods.

After cutting the Elderberries off the pod, I placed them in 1 gallon freezer bags and froze the clean elderberries. At this point, the bugs and most of the stems are removed from the berries. (The berries left in the tub were gathered up and placed in a bowl and covered with water. This floats the bugs and stems to the top. I then pour the bugs and stems from the bowl and save the berries at the bottom of the bowl.)

After they are frozen, I take the bag out of the freezer and shake a bit. (Don’t shake it too hard, because it may break and spill elderberries on the floor. Frozen elderberries thaw pretty quick when laying on the floor and make a bit of a mess. ) This shaking will shake the berries off the stems. The berries will fall to the the bottom of the bag, and the stems will move to the top. I also get my fingers in the bag in a raking motion, and bring the stems up to the top of the bag. When done, the top of the bag will have lots of stems, and the bottom of the bag will have lots of berries.

Frozen elderberries seperated from stem

Here is a picture viewed from the side. Notice the stems are on the top and berries are on the bottom. I haven’t removed these stems yet.

Frozen shucked elderberries

When I remove the stems, I place them in another bag to go back in the freezer. The first batch of stems will still have some berries on them. This will allow me to get some more berries off these stems. Once the stem bag is full I put it in the freezer for a day, I’ll repeat the shaking process with the stem bag to get more berries. Then I will discard the stems after the second cleaning.

Here is a picture of cleaned Elderberries.

Cleaned Elderberries

Notice there is still a small amount of stems in the bag. This small amount should not affect the taste of the wine. I will report back after I have a batch of wine made.

While this method is not perfect, it does save some time over shucking the berries. It took me about a hour to process 10 pounds of berries. I imagine the time will go down as I get more practice. I am always looking for better ways to clean elderberries, so if you have any ideas, post them in the comments below. Unfortunately, I only get a couple of weeks a year to try to improve the process, but there is always next year!

Enjoy!

August 31st, 2009 | Category: Wine Making | Comments Off