Joy of Home Wine Making (2 page)

You won’t find many fruit wines. Most of the ones you do find will be “pop” wines made for people who just want a bit of a buzz, and heavy sweet fruit wines, which are an acquired taste.

Once in a while you’ll find a nice surprise—a dry apple wine, or cranberry, or maybe pineapple.

However, if you look around your area no matter where it is or you ask at the local wine supply store, or you look through a list of agricultural businesses, you will likely hear of a small, regional fruit winery that uses local fruits to produce a range of wines and meads. Look also for wine competitions at state and county fairs, and see what you can find.

Washington, Oregon, and California produce many wonderful fruit wines. Massachusetts also has several, and so do New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Hawaii, and Missouri. I’ve had peach wine from Georgia, dandelion from Ohio, and many others I simply can’t remember. There’s a good chance that nearly every state in the Union produces fruit wines of some sort.

Just as there are many styles in grape wines, there are many in fruit wines. “Blueberry” describes the fruit, but it doesn’t describe the style. It can be a table wine, a dessert wine, or a social wine like port or sherry. It’s fun to explore the varieties.

One thing no one can tell you is what kind of wine you should like. Tastes are individual. It’s true that for most people a red grape wine goes better with meat and heavy sauces than most white grape wines, but if you like white wine with roasts and red wine with fish, whose business is it but yours? If the people at the next table shudder and look faint, well, they can look the other way.

The same theory follows with fruit wines, and this area is less fraught with traditions and experts. The idea of blueberry wine with ravioli might seem startling at first, but you might like it—you never know. How about dry peach wine with chicken chow mein, or raspberry with grilled vegetables? Elderberry with meat loaf or strawberry-pineapple with jack cheese tamales? You’ll never know until you try.

WHY MAKE YOUR OWN?

Making your own wine allows you to make wine to your exact tastes, inexpensively, though it’s best to keep in mind that if your tastes run to Chateau La Salle, you have to buy a certain wineyard in France.

You can make grape wines from concentrates and kits available from your local wine supply store, or by mail. You can even make wine from real grapes, if you grow your own, or pick them. One of our local wine supply stores orders California wine grapes and gets them shipped out here to the Midwest every year. There are also winemaking clubs that share the use of wine and cider presses.

But fruit wine, and mead—now, that’s something not everyone can have, except those who make their own.

On top of everything, it’s fun to serve something you’ve made yourself. When you make your own wine, your creativity, experience, and judgment go into it. What comes out of the bottle is different from what anyone else makes. It’s not mass-produced. It’s homemade by someone who cares about the product, and who better than you?

You can use fewer chemicals than the commercial wineries do. You can use finer ingredients. You can age your wines longer and with more care.

You can do your own blending and experimenting. You can
make 200 gallons of rhubarb champagne, if that’s your bag, or you can make 15 to 20 gallons of various fruit wines. It’s up to you.

Then there’s money. The most any of my wines has ever cost was $6.00 a gallon one year when raspberries were hard to get hold of. That’s $1.50 a bottle. Usually, a gallon of homemade wine runs from $1.00 to $3.00 a gallon to produce. That’s four to five bottles. I mostly make wine in five-gallon batches these days, and buy or gather fruit in bulk to save time and money.

If you are like me, you won’t stop buying wine at the wine shop. There’s nothing like a good Cabernet or zinfandel. But there’s nothing in the wine store like my raspberry, either. If there were, it would cost five times what it costs me to make it.

IT TAKES SO LONG!

Yeah. So? Time will fly. You’ll be busy doing other things. You aren’t going to sit there and watch the jug for six months! Before you know it, a few months or a year has gone by, and you get to taste and try something new.

Time is on your side as a winemaker. You have to have patience. It takes a couple of years to get up to speed. There are no “instant” wines. You can have a drinkable product in as little as three months with the beginners’ recipe, if you make it in the summer. Quite frankly though, it’s not really worth it to make something just drinkable. You want it to be GOOD. So take your time. After a few batches, your tongue and brain will know what to expect and you won’t mind so much about the time it takes.

WILL THIS STUFF KILL ME OR MAKE ME GO BLIND?

No. Don’t worry. Unless you do something really silly like use contaminated equipment and ingredients, or unless you drink too much, winemaking is very safe. If it goes bad, you’ll know, and you won’t drink it.

There are a lot of horror stories left over from Prohibition days about bathtub gin and homemade beer and wine. Some of them are probably true. People made alcohol out of nearly anything, and some of it was poisonous. The distilled stuff was the worst.

You aren’t making wine just for a cheap high, you’re making it with good equipment and good ingredients; barring accidents, like mistaking deadly nightshade for blackberries, everything should be just fine. Later on I’ll give you a list of poisonous plants and tell you how to care for your equipment.

HOW DO I DUPLICATE A CHABLIS?

You don’t, unless, as I said before, you own a vineyard or use a commercial wine kit. Lots of people ask me questions like this.

Some home winemakers are really into duplicating grape wines using other fruits. They caution against using raspberry as a table wine because it “tastes too much of the fruit.” My philosophy is: so what? I like fruit.

If you want a Chablis or a Burgundy, buy some! I just love reading descriptions of grape wines that say they have “overtones of blackberry,” or a “slight strawberry flavor.” Grapes are a marvelously complex fruit. Over the centuries they have been nurtured and bred and fermented and blended into a huge variety of wines.

But if blackberry is what you want or what you have, make it! My blackberry has overtones of blackberry, that’s for sure! It has many of the characteristics of a red wine, and if I added some elderberries and messed around with it, I could probably come up with something that tasted close to an inexpensive red Burgundy. But unless I lived in a very out-of-the-way area with no wine stores, I can’t see the point. If I wanted Burgundy, I would make it with grapes, not blackberries.

You can make wines from this book that don’t taste particularly of any specific fruit. Many of the blends in the advanced section are like that. Sometimes a “generic” red, rosé, or white is what is needed. They might remind you of some of the classic wines (“Ah, a slight overtone of Gewürztraminer”), but they aren’t going to be exact duplicates. And that’s OK by me. Don’t worry if the apricot comes out tasting of apricot. Don’t expect it to be a Clairette de Die, either. If it happens to remind you of that wine, well, mazel tov!

MODERATION IN ALL THINGS

Alcoholism is no joke. It’s a very real thing. Respect alcohol and the effect it can have on you and others. Never force or trick
someone into drinking alcohol. Don’t ask why if someone says no thanks. Just accept the no with good grace.

If you give a gift of wine, be sure it will be an acceptable present. Be sensitive to other peoples’ feelings.

As for yourself—use good sense. You can get just as drunk on wine and beer as you can on hard spirits. It takes more to do it, of course, but alcohol is alcohol. Be moderate in what you imbibe, and keep it a pleasure, not a destructive compulsion. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t drink if you are pregnant, underage, or caring for vulnerable people. Don’t make me sorry I wrote this book.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Read at least the first three or four chapters before you start anything. Then try the first simple recipe, going through the steps carefully and waiting a month or two to see if you like the results. You can start two or three variations of the first recipe at the same time if you like.

It might be fun and instructive if you and a friend start your first batches at the same time; that way you can compare notes and results. Once your other friends hear that you’ve tried this and indicate interest, show them how to make their own so they won’t try to wheedle you out of your favorites!

Then read the rest of the book. Study what I have to say about equipment and ingredients, and start some of the intermediate wines made with whole fruit. Fermentation alone is a fascinating subject. Get to know what to expect, and refine your methods.

After that, have fun doing what interests you in the other sections of the book. Buy other books on home winemaking and get to know other people who make wine. If you have a computer and modem, check out the various winemaking discussion groups on-line. Join a club or enter some of your wines in competitions.

Most home winemakers are interesting, generous people. They give advice freely and are interested in hearing what someone else is doing. Occasionally you find someone who is convinced that their way is the only way of doing something, but not very often. And remember, there will
always
be someone who knows more about winemaking than you do.

JOI DE VIVRE

Have fun! Don’t get bound up in the details and forget to enjoy yourself when you use this book. As long as you are happy with what you are doing, and getting pleasure from it, you’re doing it the right way! Almost anyone can make wine. Almost anyone can make GOOD wine. You are probably one of them. Like my grandmother said: Do the best you can and don’t worry.

PART ONE

Beginning Winemaking

CHAPTER ONE

A Brief History of Winemaking

NOTE: If you want to start making wine right away, you can skip on ahead to chapter 2 and read this later. However, I thought it would be nice to know a little of the history you’re about to be part of.

W
inemaking is an art that is thousands of years old. It isn’t clear how many thousands of years, though wine residue has been found in clay jugs that were dug up in the ruins of an old Middle Eastern fort from 1000
B.C
. Generally, archaeologists think it dates from over three thousand years before the Romans, probably in what is now Turkey. There is evidence that wine of some sort was being made at that time in China, as well, from plums, apricots, and rice. The poet Li Po had much to say about drinking wine in China, but not, alas, much about methods used to make it.

The skins of wild grapes carry wild yeasts, which were probably responsible for that first bowl or container of grape juice’s accidentally fermenting into wine. We’ll never know how it first got started. Maybe a woman crushed grapes to feed her baby the juice. Maybe some whole grapes in a tightly woven basket got a bit squashed and developed a winey odor instead of a spoiled smell.

Grapes were an important food source in the Mediterranean area. No one wanted to waste food; preservation was vital, even among nomadic people.

It’s certain that people quickly noticed that the “funny” grape juice kept longer after fermentation, and that it gave a warm, happy feeling to those who drank it.

It’s possible that even before the advent of the clay jar, wine was made by storing grapes or grape juice in sewn animal skins (with the fur on the outside) and hoping for the best. The clay jar had to be an improvement. Probably, at that point, the first wine snob evolved: “Oh, the old wine-in-a-skin? Never touch the stuff.”

Wineskins still exist. One can still buy the staple container of yesteryear’s free concerts and hiking trips.

The Egyptians made wine as well as beer. The Greeks picked it up from the Egyptians and the Persians. It was made not only from grapes (as the sugar source) but also from dates and honey.

Wine was viewed as both a food and a medicine, and it had great trade value. Imagine the value of a substance that was both food and drink. On top of everything, it stored easily, would keep for a decent amount of time, and was portable. The world’s first convenience food?

Many ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean are full of wine jars and the oddly shaped amphorae.

Wine was an important part of many religions, as both a sacrament and a sacrifice. People even paid their taxes with wine. I don’t think the IRS would go for that today.

It’s thought that wine was drunk young for the most part, usually within the first year. Experts feel that it was probably thin and sweet, turning to vinegar within a few months or a year, depending on how it was stored. Jars were not cheap, nor were they airtight. Bottles had been invented, but they were tiny, valuable objects used to store expensive perfumes and salves. No one would have put wine into a bottle. Too extravagant!