Wine making updates

Started two batches of wine today:

1 gallon Green Tea Blend
(½ Dragonwell & ½ Young Hyson).
Specific Gravity = 1.074
Potential Alcohol = 11.84%

5 gallons Black Tea
(China Rose Petal Leaf Tea)
Specific Gravity = 1.080
Potential Alcohol = 12.8%

Also, I strained and oaked the 3 gallons of grape tea I’m making.

Wines Bottled and Made

On Sunday Alex, Elana and Byron came over to help make and bottle some wine. We started off with cleaning and sorting the 25 pounds of grapes Elana and Byron brought from their home. Then, as I sampled and measured the acidity and specific gravity of the liquid, Alex and Byron mashed the grapes by hand – everybody was quite disappointed when I forbid feet in the primary fermentation bucket. If you had seen Alex’s feet, you understand why.

I’m making an oaked red. I think we’ll get about three gallons of grape wine (14 or so bottles). Half of which will go to Elana and Byron. Byron is a graphic designer and will be making the labels for this wine (so cool). I think I’ll be naming it “Wrath.”

We also bottled. We began with the five gallons of Maple Sap wine (named Acer Saccharum, after the latin name for Sugar Maple). It’s a crystal clear wine with a spicy flavor (from the cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon I added) with a maple after taste. The flavor is surprising and we all agreed that it will make an excellent mulled wine. Its alcohol level at bottling is 14.65%, but will even out to fifteen while aging. I got a total of 23 750ml bottles – two of which I gave to those helping me and 10 of which will go to Matt and Bethany who gave me the sap to make the wine. In all, I have 11 bottles to keep.

The six gallons of apple wine produced 28 375ml bottles for Alex’s wedding as well as 12 (if I remember correctly – I’m away from home as I write this) 750ml bottles. I gave my helpers two bottles of that as well, leaving me with 10 bottles of my own. Unfortunately, I still can’t find my original documentation for the apple wine although I do have the recipe to make it again. And, the SG readings that I wrote on the bottle rubbed off. I believe that I expected an alcohol level of 18% or so, I think it’s pretty close to that. The wine is called Trifecta in homage to of the apple blend I used to make it – it’s a mix of McIntosh, Cortland, and McCoun windfalls I collected from McDougal Orchards. It has a wonderful taste. We blended some of the maple and apple in a glass – next year I may have to make a blend of the two.

My only concern with the apple is that it’s not a clear as I would have liked it to be. Next time I need to use more pectin enzyme during the fermentation.

Not a bad haul. If anybody would like the recipes I'm using, email me and I'll be glad to send them to you with my comments.

Rose Hip Violet Wine

Last night I bottled a slightly less than a gallon batch of Rose Hip Violet wine. When all the spilling, drinking, bottling and corking was done, I walked away with seven 375ml bottles. Not bad.

I like where this wine is going. In about a year it will taste like more. I'll probably do three gallons next summer.

Now I just need to come up with a name for it.

Birthday Wine

Today's my birthday!

After years of having my birthday fall at the beginning of the week or midweek, it's great to have it fall not only on a Friday, but on a Friday I have off.

I tried spending the morning enjoying my garden (I'll post some pics of it later on in the summer). It was nice until I noticed the invasion of violets. Last year these misconstrued shrinkers almost choked out my roses. They devoured my dusty miller and engaged in total warfare with an advancing squadron of lily of the valley. I usually adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards any plant with useful properties. This includes violets, day lilies, dandelions, and so on. If I can eat them, turn them into a poultice, or dry them for potpourri, then they can stay. However, killing my roses is tantamount to garden treason.

I couldn’t see just throwing them out. There were so many of them – there are still a helluva lot of the little flowers. I went through my reference shelves and pantry and discovered a recipe for flower wine (pansies specifically, a cousin of the violet) and I combined that with a recipe for rose hip wine and a packet of dried rose hips I’ve have kicking around.

Everything is now boiled and soaking waiting for some pectin enzyme and yeast. I’ve made a gallon. It should be ready (although a bit young) by the end of the summer.

New batch of wine in the primary!

I discovered a five gallon bucket of sap on my door step last night. I had been talking to some of my friends about turning Maple sap into wine. They were tapping trees and were getting more than they had the capacity to boil down.
The recipe I used was pretty simple: sugar; cloves; lemon (juice and zest); cinnamon; tannin; yeast nutrient; and yeast. I based it off a recipe I found here. Their measurements were for a gallon of wine, however, and I really wanted to try a bit of cinnamon with the maple. If anybody wants the exact measurements I used, email me. I’ll send them along.

One other change I made to the recipe was the yeast. I couldn’t find any Riesling yeast yesterday, so I used a packet of Red Star Montrachet – can’t imagine that being too big of a deal.

It took until this morning for the must to cool down enough to add the yeast. It looked great – the recipe called for boiling the sap for 15 minutes which turned it from clear to a beautiful amber. The tannin pushed it a bit darker, but I’m guessing it will return to that amber color over time. The must also had a wonderful smell and flavor – spicy, like an old New England farm house during Christmas.
Maximum expected alcohol percentage is right around 15%.

This batch will spend about nine days in the primary (a bucket) before being transferred to a secondary (a five gallon glass carboy).

Before anybody asks me for a bottle, I’d should point out that the stuff won’t be drinkable until January 2010 at the very earliest. It probably won’t be great until July of that year. Damn.