Joy of Home Wine Making (4 page)

And stand back, I should think. Sounds dangerous.

Many old cookbooks, going back even to medieval times, had
recipes for fruit wines using honey. In those days it was assumed that the reader would know the basics. Description of method was hazy. The important thing was the list of ingredients. One that I read included the body of a male chicken. No reason was given. I guess you were just supposed to take it on faith that the recipe’s inventor was cocksure.

BACK IN THE U.S.A.

In the New World, Native Americans made mild alcoholic beverages. Pulque, tequila, and other drinks were made mostly in southern regions, including Central and South America. These beverages were not a major part of the culture. When the Spaniards and the Portuguese brought their vines with them, their wines quickly supplanted the native beverages.

In North America, the northern European colonialists brought with them collections of recipes that were very precious to them, handed down from generation to generation. They were mostly fruit and vegetable wines, or country wines, as they were sometimes called.

Even Martha Washington made wine. Unless their religion forbade it, most people made their own, since imported grape wines were terribly expensive.

Vineyards were established, both privately and for the manufacturing of wine to be sold. By the time of the Revolution the United States was chugging along pretty much in the same groove as Western Europe, with established wineries, breweries, and distilleries.

The country was mostly rural. Farm wives and husbands had their own methods of making beer and wine and even the harder stuff. Sugar wasn’t too expensive, and there was always honey. Many a fine cordial or elderberry wine was made.

Then came Prohibition. It was a mess. Many producers and vineyards went out of business, never to return. Organized crime cheerfully poisoned and cheated millions of people. Bootleggers made the most horrible stuff and sold it as liquor and wine.

Prohibition lasted fourteen years. It took the American wine industry a long time to recover. First, there was the Great Depression of the ’30s, when it was difficult to start a new enterprise of any kind. The money needed to establish a vineyard that wouldn’t
produce wine for several years was not easily found. Then there was the little matter of World War Two. Who had time to mess with wine when the fate of the world was at stake?

Gradually American wine came back into its own. By the ’60s it was no longer considered embarrassing to admit you drank American wine. In the ’70s, and ’80s, some truly great grape wines were being made. Vineyards were popping up all over the country, but especially on the West Coast.

Homemade fruit wines were beginning to flourish, as well. The idea that only a desperate booze hound would make homemade wine was fading with the memory of Prohibition. In the ’60s people experimented with alternative lifestyles in many different ways. Self-sufficiency was not a new concept, but it was being more widely explored. People were making bread with their own hands after years of eating only bakery bread. People began making their own beer and wine. For a while there, you could buy a winemaking kit from the Sears Roebuck catalog!

I drank some, once. Once was enough.

In the mid-seventies, the fad died back a little, but not out. Little by little, clubs and societies dedicated to home winemaking were born. A few winemaking supply houses hung on and did acceptable business. Gradually, more and more people began to experiment.

I think organizations such as the Society for Creative Anachronism and the various Renaissance festivals have had a lot to do with keeping winemaking going. Mead in particular has been explored in those circles, as well as ale and beer. That person who crunches out the code in the cubicle next to you could very well be known as Lady Montegreen on the weekends, specializing in peach melomel and juggling on the side.

More and more people have chosen a quieter life these last few decades, trading the corporate ladder for the apple tree ladder. The secretary might have a Ph.D. The janitor might be a science fiction writer. The guy who comes in as a consultant to figure out what went wrong in the assembly line might have a thriving herb farm. You never know.

The ’80s weren’t the age of conspicuous consumption for everyone. The standardization of consumer goods made a lot of folks decide they might want to get into planting stock instead of buying and selling it.

Many people are finding that making their own wine is an intriguing, satisfying hobby that takes them outside the bounds of crass commercialism after a hard day on the eighty-eighth floor.

Things are quietly booming in home winemaking. There are more people you can talk to, more supply houses, more books on the subject than ever before.

Think of what you can do! With a little time and effort you can have a respectable wine cellar (well, maybe wine closet?) with a different style of wine and flavor of wine for every week of the year. Chateau la Smith can swap recipes over the fence (or down the stairwell) with Chateau la Morgenstern.

It only takes a little time here and there. Skip the boob tube on Saturday morning and go to a local farmers’ market, or out to a pick-your-own place. Six months later look with pride at the lovely row of strawberry melomel you’ve just put down for a long winter’s nap. By next holiday season you’ll have a wonderful wine to go with the turkey, ham, or cashew loaf. And that mint you bottled last winter? It will be a hit as a wine cooler at the Memorial Day picnic you’re planning.

Spotted some berry bushes on a fishing trip up at the cabin? Take a half hour to gather some the night before you leave for home. In the next year or two you can serve guests your own elderberry sherry, your own woodruff aperitif, or after-dinner port-style blueberry. And maybe your guests will bring you a bottle of their specialty wine to enliven your next birthday or anniversary.

CHAPTER TWO

The First Gallon

(or, A Simple Apple Wine, I Think You’ll Admire Its Presumption)

W
ell, my friend, here’s how to make your first gallon. Note the lack of glamorous, expensive equipment and ingredients. Do not be alarmed. You can spend more money later. Note the need for patience. You can use more of that later, too.

Think of winemaking as breadmaking, except that it takes six months to rise, and six months to bake. A lot of people shy away from making bread because they say it takes too long. Nonsense. It takes a mere half hour to make the stuff, assuming you do it by hand. You don’t watch it rise, and you don’t watch it bake. You set the timer, and do intensely important stuff like watching CNN or cleaning the garage in the meantime.

Same deal with wine. Of course, while waiting for the wine, you could be making several batches of homebrewed beer. Just a thought.

Pick a nice quiet time when you aren’t likely to be interrupted by a call from the president or Hollywood, and put on some nice music. The first time always takes a while because it just does.

First, figure out a place you can put your wine to ferment. The first couple of days you’ll want to watch it, but that will get old very quickly, and wine does best in subdued light or in darkness. In fact, strong light will fade the color (not a big deal in apple wine, but it’s best to start good habits early).

The wine will also, ahem, have an odor as it ferments. Not a terrible odor, but some. All those little yeastie beasties are passing gas, you know. Bothers some people but not others.

You also want to keep it warm, but not too warm (60-80°F), and you don’t want to move it around. You don’t want it near vinegar, solvents, cleaning supplies, or your pile of dirty socks.

Panic-stricken already?

Look, it’s OK. Do the best you can and don’t worry. A corner of the kitchen or the back of a closet that isn’t airtight is just fine. A cupboard is fine. A basement is OK for later, but it’s not the best place right now. The attic is right out. Look around. You’ll find a place. If the ideal place gets too much light, put a big cardboard box over your batch.

Equipment:

1 one-gallon glass jug—an ex-apple juice, cranberry juice, or wine jug that hasn’t been used to store kerosene, vinegar, or nuclear waste

1 rubber band

1 4×4 in. square of heavy kitchen plastic wrap

1 medium-sized food grade funnel, plastic or metal

a long stick or rod for stirring (you can whittle down a wood spoon, but a long chopstick works just fine, too)

later: another gallon jug, 4 or 5 clean wine bottles, corks, a corker, and a 3-4 ft. length of clear plastic tubing from an aquarium shop or winemaking supply shop. For the latter, see complete description in Siphon and Racking Tube.

Ingredients:

1 12 oz. can frozen apple juice (any brand)

1 6 oz. can frozen lemonade or the juice of two lemons, strained (don’t use bottled lemon juice, ugh)

1 lb. of sugar (two cups) or 1½ lb. mild honey

1 gallon of water, boiled and cooled while covered

1 packet of wine yeast (champagne or Montrachet)

½ teaspoon pectic enzyme (optional but recommended)

5 Campden tablets (optional but recommended)

N
OTES

Later on in your winemaking career I will encourage you to use a proper rubber bung and air lock instead of the rubber band and plastic (to keep the air out and let the gas out of the bottle), but this is your first gallon, and this method should be OK.

The wine yeast, pectic enzyme, and Campden tablets can be purchased at your local wine supply or brewing supply store (or from any of the many mail order places listed in the back of this book). So can the rubber bung and air lock and any number of other interesting gadgets.

Wine yeast costs about fifty cents a packet. Don’t use bread yeast or beer yeast. They don’t come out just right, although they will work in a pinch. Wine yeast is best because it doesn’t make “off” flavors, and it tolerates higher alcohol content. One packet makes one to five gallons of wine.

The pectin naturally present in fruit is nice for making jelly but not for making wine. It can create a harmless, but less than aesthetic, haze. Pectic enzyme eats the pectin, helping the wine to clear as it ferments. If the idea of the pectic enzyme is too complicated or weird to you, leave it out for right now, but really, this is not a big deal.

The Campden tablets are for sterilizing the jug. They are sodium metabisulphite. If you are sensitive to sulphites, don’t use these. Many winemakers use them to sterilize the juices in the wine as well, but we don’t need to worry about that so much in this case. If you can’t or don’t want to use Campden tablets (some people are very sensitive to this chemical, though it’s perfectly safe for most), I’ll give you an alternative method as we go along.

Many jugs these days are actually 4 liters, somewhat less than a U.S. gallon. Try to find a gallon jug, but don’t worry if you can’t. It won’t make any real difference in this recipe.

FINALLY:
Ignore everything else in the wine supply store until you know what you are doing and have finished this book. If you
must
look, don’t buy. Yet. Later on, you can buy as much as you want. Talk to the clerks, who are usually the owners, and often possess a wealth of knowledge, which they will cheerfully pass on to you.

P
ROCEDURE

Boil most of the water in a stainless steel or enamel pot and let it cool, covered. In most areas, this isn’t really necessary, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Boil the sugar or honey with one quart of the water, and let it cool, stirring a little to make sure the sugar dissolves. Add an extra half cup of sugar if you are using lemons instead of lemonade. Take the cans of juice out of the freezer to let them defrost.

Sanitize the 1 gallon jug by boiling it in a large pot (such as a canning kettle or stockpot) of water for 1 to 15 minutes, or wash and clean it with a bottle brush, rinse, then swoosh it out with the Campden solution. To make the Campden solution, with the back of a spoon crush the tablets as finely as possible, and dissolve the powder in one cup of cool water, which you have placed in a jar with a tight-fitting lid. Shake up the jar like mad to facilitate the dissolving. You will never get all the lumps out, but do the best you can and don’t worry.

Pour this solution into the clean jug (a funnel makes it easy) and swoosh it around the inside, making sure you cover the entire surface, then pour it back out into the jar. You can reuse this solution as long as it still smells like sulfur.

Another method is simply to soak the jug in a solution of unscented bleach and water for 20 minutes. An ounce or two of bleach to 5 gallons of water will sanitize the jug just fine. Rinse it out with really hot water to get rid of as much of the chlorine smell as possible. I worry that the chlorine will affect the taste of the wine, so I use the Campden method, but I have used bleach in emergencies.

Cleanliness in winemaking is not quite as essential as it is in beermaking, but it is still very important.

When the sugar water is still a bit warm, pour it into the jug, using a funnel that has either been rinsed in the Campden solution or boiled. Add the thawed apple juice and the strained lemonade
or lemon juice. Then add the plain, cool water up to where the neck of the jug starts to slant upward. Add the pectic enzyme if you are using it. Stir with a long wooden or metal stick, over which you have poured boiling water. A long chopstick also works fine. Put the piece of plastic over the top and secure it with the rubber band. Store it someplace out of the light and out of the way. Twenty-four hours later, take off the rubber band and tap the packet of wine yeast into the jug. Replace the plastic with a new piece, and put the rubber band back on snugly.