Joy of Home Wine Making (11 page)

SUGARS AND OTHER SWEETENERS

When I say sugar, I mean either cane, or beet white sugar, or sucrose. There is no chemical difference between the two, and they both work fine. Always make sure to keep the sugar clean. A tin canister works best. Sugar kept in a sack can absorb “off” odors if kept near something else with a strong smell. I tend to stockpile sugar when it is on sale.

Invert sugar is a sugar that has been chemically changed to ferment out faster, and it is sometimes used in beermaking. It’s expensive. Some yeasts don’t react well to it. Some very advanced winemakers use it for special effects.

Corn sugar, or dextrose, is also a beermaking ingredient. It’s
more expensive than regular sugar, but you can use it if you want to. Some winemakers like it better than cane or beet sugar. Use it just as you would plain sugar.

NOTE: As an experiment you might try making the straight mead recipe, an all-honey wine with no fruit, herbs, or flowers in it. Then make a gallon of wine using only sugar, no fruit, herbs, or other flavoring. It will be interesting, and you’ll learn a lot!

Corn syrups I’ve never used.

Brown sugar is merely white sugar with molasses added to it. It used to be unrefined white but is no longer. Use it by weight equal to the white sugar in a recipe, but realize that it will affect the taste and color of the wine considerably.

Molasses is what’s left over from sugar refining. I’ve never used it in winemaking. It has a very strong flavor and color.

Raw sugar is expensive. I have never used it in winemaking, but there is no reason you can’t, if you want to. Use it by weight.

H
ONEY

Honey is plant nectar refined by the digestive system of a bee. My partner claims it is bee vomit and won’t eat it, except when it has been made into wine. It has traces of other matter in it, like pollen, wax, and bits of bee, occasionally. Different honeys have different flavors, depending on what the bees grazed on. Generally, lighter honeys have lighter flavors, and darker honeys have more assertive flavors.

I prefer to use local honey that I get from a beekeeper at the farmers’ market rather than supermarket honey. Supermarket honey consists of blended honeys from many different places according to what was cheapest at the time and what tastes the most bland. However, sometimes one has no choice.

Honey has the disadvantage of being more expensive than sugar. It’s also harder to handle, since it’s liquid and sticky. I try to buy it from the beekeeper in jars that hold the right amount for a batch of wine—either one, two, three, or ten pounds of honey. That way
I can just warm up the closed jar in a pan of warm water to make it easier to pour into the boiling pot.

If I am adding just half a pound to some sugar, I eye the jar carefully and “bloop” it in by eye rather than mess up a measuring cup for weighing. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. A few ounces more or less won’t hurt anything.

You can measure honey by warming it up in its container in some hot water and warming up a glass measuring cup in hot water. The honey will pour easily into the measuring cup and come out of the cup easily if you pour it back out quickly. If you let it cool, use a spatula to scrape out the full measure. DON’T use the old cooking trick of oiling the measuring cup! That’s fine for cooking, but it will give you an unpleasant oil film in your wine.

More honey is needed to make a measurement equivalent to sugar. In the various recipes I will say, “2½ lbs. of sugar OR 3 lbs. of honey,” give or take a quarter pound here and there. Sometimes I advise a little more or less depending on how much I think the honey affects the taste of the wine.

In ALL recipes feel free to use either honey or sugar, no matter what is specified.

If you use sugar for the most part, I also encourage you to substitute half a pound of honey for a half pound of the total amount of sugar used. Just do a straight swap, it’s easier. Honey mellows out the flavor and gives more body to a wine, even if you add a small amount of it. In big batches of wine I might use half honey and half sugar and still think of it as a mead.

Honey adds its own taste to a wine. Some people like it and some don’t.

Some people prefer honey over sugar for health reasons, but as far as I’m concerned, sugar is sugar. From an ecological point of view, though, I prefer honey. It doesn’t deplete the soil, dirty the air, use much fuel, or have to be shipped vast distances. Instead, our crops are fertilized, local people have a lucrative hobby or actual jobs, and I get nice honey. Seems reasonable to me. Downtrodden, exploited proletariat worker bees might disagree.

M
ALT

You can use light malts in winemaking. I don’t advise using ALL malt, unless you want to make a very beerlike wine. Yeast
likes malt, and half a cup of light malt (dry or liquid) in a recipe in place of some of the sugar or honey can be very nice, particularly in the vegetable wines. It WILL change the flavor, though. Buy malt at the beer and wine supply store, not the expensive way in the health food store.

Different malts have different flavors. The darker a malt is, the more assertive it is. Measure it out the same way you do honey. Store any leftovers in the fridge.

G
RAPE
C
ONCENTRATE

Very sweet, and flavorful, of course! Half a pound or one pint of red or white substituted for half a pound of sugar or honey in a recipe will give you a wine with more body and flavor, though be aware that you won’t always want the grape flavor. In some recipes you can also use grape concentrate in addition to sugar or honey if you want a higher alcohol content. Refrigerate any leftovers and use them as quickly as possible.

The variety you can get is astonishing. If you are buying grape concentrates to make a grape wine, buy the best you can afford. Always ask your supplier’s advice on the different brands, and buy only fresh concentrates. If it comes out of the can brown, return it. In some wine supply places you can buy the concentrates in one-pound or one-quart cans.

F
RESH
G
RAPE
J
UICE

If you can get it, use it! Fresh wine grape juice is sometimes available in grape-growing areas. A local wine supply store might be able to give you more information.

Aseptically packaged grape juice is also available and is wonderful stuff. It is packaged in mylar and plastic like some fruit juices, and it has been sterilized. You might have to mail order it.

NOTE: In any recipe, you can substitute some honey, malt, or grape concentrate for part of the sugar or honey. Only the honey should be used in quantities of more than half a pound.

ACID BLEND

Acid is necessary to give wine its “bite.” It helps keep colors from fading or mudding out, and it helps preserve the wine. Acid blend is a blend of citric, malic, and tartaric acid, and is a good, balanced product to use. Sometimes it is merely labeled Acid Blend, and sometimes it has a commercial name. It is inexpensive and keeps very well. Older recipes sometimes didn’t even include acid! If the fruit was high in acid, it didn’t matter, though sometimes you got a very insipid wine.

Other recipes used mostly citric acid, which is OK. It works. Acid blend is better, though.

Did you ever notice there is acid in soda pop? Check it out.

NEVER USE VINEGAR as a substitute for acid.

L
EMONS

You can substitute the juice of one lemon for one teaspoon of acid blend in most recipes. It adds a little flavor of its own. The problem is that lemons vary in size. They also vary in acidity. Most of the time this is no problem. Acid blend is cheaper and more accurate, however.

Zest, by the way, is the thin layer of colored skin on a citrus fruit, which can be pared off the bitter white pith below it for added flavor.

Old recipes sometimes specified “slice one lemon,” never saying whether they meant the whole thing or just the fruit without the peel. From “bitter” experience, I suggest using only juice and zest.

GRAPE TANNIN

Tannin is an astringent compound that gives a dryness to the mouthfeel of a wine. This is very necessary, especially in red wines. Tannin also helps clear and stabilize the wine. Wine supply stores sell food-grade grape tannin. It doesn’t take much per gallon for the effect; a quarter teaspoon to a teaspoon will do the trick. It also keeps well. Some fruits (like grapes, obviously!) come with their own tannin supply in their skins. Elderberries have plenty! Blueberries have some, as do blackberries.

Use grape tannin unless you are allergic to it. It comes in a powder form or a liquid form. I have given measurements for the
dry form in my recipes. There is evidence that the liquid tannin gets used more efficiently by the wine, though. Traditionally, we add tannin to red fruit wines, and not to white fruit wines, but see how you feel about it. Tastes differ.

Older recipes either skipped it, since it wasn’t readily available, or used tea, which has a form of tannin in it. “A half cup of strong tea” is what they usually recommended per gallon. This is OK by way of experiment or in case of emergency; however, teas vary in their tannin content, and “strong” isn’t a very accurate measurement.

PECTIC ENZYME

This is an enzyme that eats pectin. Pectin is the stuff in some fruits that causes them to jell when cooked. In winemaking, it results in a haze. It’s best to avoid hazy, jellylike wine.

Some fruits are high in pectin, others are very low. I usually use it out of sheer habit. The enzyme is killed off by heat, so always make sure your must is tepid before you add it. Give it twelve to twenty-four hours to work before you add the yeast.

Pectic enzyme comes in a granular form, and the standard amount is one teaspoon. It is also available in a liquid form that must be refrigerated. Seven to eight drops per gallon are used for fruit mixtures, and three teaspoons for grape juice. You can use either form, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll refer to the granular form in the recipes.

Pectic enzyme is cheap and saves you a lot of hassle, so use it!

YEASTS

Yeasts are living creatures, even if they don’t look like it when they come out of the yeast packet. They eat sugar, reproduce, and colonize the must. Then when there are enough of them, they make alcohol and carbon dioxide. What a life!

When the alcohol content gets too high (as it were), or the yeast run out of food, most of them die off and fall to the bottom of the wine as lees, or sediment. There are always a few left over after the initial fermentation dies back, which is why you want to be sure that there is either no more sugar for them to eat or that you kill them off by adding extra alcohol or a chemical stabilizer
before you bottle. I will tell you more about this a little later on. Yeasts can be very sneaky at reproducing.

Temperatures above 110°F will kill off wine yeasts. They work best at temperatures between 60° and 80°. Cold doesn’t kill them, it just slows them down to almost no action. It’s your job to make a happy little home for them long enough to produce wine. Most wine must ferments best at around 75°F. When you put the wine into the secondary fermenter, a temperature cooler than 75° is best.

There are thousands of kinds of yeasts on this planet. Back in the olden days, people threw the grapes into the vat and hoped for the best. Of course, they didn’t really know about yeast as such. They only knew that something caused the wine to ferment, and it happened more reliably when they added the grape skins.

Then they started saving some of the living wine that turned out well, using it to inoculate the next batch of wine. Eventually, various strains of wines yeasts that gave a good clean fermentation, firm sediment, and high alcohol were isolated.

It was only recently that home winemakers began to have access to good wine yeasts. Granular Montrachet, Flor sherry, and champagne yeasts are pretty standard now and don’t cost much. But there are better wine yeasts available. They are liquid yeasts named after the various regions in which they originated. You have to use a starter to incubate them, which can take one to four days. They cost a little more but seem well worth it. The kinds available fluctuate from area to area, so I am not going to name them here. Talk to your local wine supply person or the yeast maven in your local winemaking club.