Joy of Home Wine Making (6 page)

With my first batch, you see, it hadn’t quite finished fermenting when I bottled, and we had a warm spell. I should have waited longer, or stopped the fermentation with some stabilizer from the wine supply place. Or bottled it as champagne with the proper
bottles and plastic champagne caps. But I didn’t know any of this.
You, however, can benefit from my experience
.

Later on you will learn how to use more or less sugar, and to use a hydrometer for accuracy, and real fruit, and all that.

After a month, get the bottle and put it in the fridge to chill. Remove the cork, decant, if necessary, and get out some nice glasses. Carefully pour, trying to avoid disturbing any sediment at the bottom. There usually isn’t much.

So, what does it taste like when you are done? Sort of like a strong apple cider: dry and crisp.
Nothing
like Annie Green Springs, thank-you very much. With this recipe you get 7-9 percent alcohol, which will keep a year or two. It’s best drunk young.

All of this exposition for such a simple procedure! After you have done this once or twice, you can explore the process a bit more. You don’t have to wait till the first batch is done. You can use grape juice or other frozen juices and move on up to real fruit, acid blend, yeast energizer, and tannin, all of which I will explain later. You’ll also be using the proper equipment. You can use the many wine concentrates available in the wine supply stores. Most of them are quite acceptable, although you’ll have to use five one-gallon jugs or a five-gallon carboy to make them. (The five-gallon carboy works better.)

TIME

This first, simple wine can take as little as two months to ferment out, or as long as six. But remember, time is on your side. Don’t try to rush it.

SERVING

Serve your wine in nice wine glasses. Your wine deserves a chance to look its best. Inexpensive, clear wine glasses are easy to obtain. Only use colored glasses when the color of the wine isn’t quite what you’d hoped, or when the relative who gave them to you is visiting.

French-style bistro glasses are also nice for casual sipping or social wines.

Try to avoid mason jars unless you’re having some kind of
theme party. Don’t use plastic with wine. It gives the wine an off taste.

MORE IDEAS

Here are some other ideas for making some simple, but very nice, wines in the beginner’s mode.

Get a few more gallon jugs. Follow the apple recipe, but substitute ordinary frozen grape juice (purple or white, or both), orange juice, pineapple, cranraspberry, or whatever for the apple juice and lemonade. Easy, huh? Some you will like better than others, but having four or five nice light wines around isn’t such a bad idea and you need to use up those corks.

Another idea: once you have the first batch of apple wine going, try making another batch with two, count them two, 12 oz. cans of juice, plus only the one 6 oz. can of lemonade, and sugar and see what you get.

After that, make up the frozen apple juice recipe with only the one 12 oz. can of juice, but with two lbs. of sugar instead of one lb.

These last two might take longer to ferment out, since they will have more alcohol, but when they are done and you compare the three it will be a good way for you to learn the different ways you can change flavors and strengths.

While you are at it, I suppose you could also try 12 oz. of lemonade by itself, though all lemonade might be a bit acidic, as might limeade.

You never know…there was this batch of mead I made once, which was mostly limeade and came out really fine. (I did it on a bet, OK?) You’ll find the recipe further on. Look under ReinConation Citrus Melomel.

Be aware that a lot of the frozen juices these days are not 100 percent juice. Many are merely flavored corn syrup, and aren’t going to be very flavorful. Check the ingredients list to make sure you are getting as close to 100 percent fruit juice as you can. Reading labels is a good habit to get into.

I’ve tried a few of the “tropicals” with mixed results. If you look closely at the ingredients you’ll notice that “white grape juice” is a key ingredient. This is tropical? Nothing wrong with it except that it’s bland, and so is the bit of pineapple, guava or
banana that is mixed in with it. I can’t see any sense in making bland wine.

CANNED JUICES

Using canned juices is a bit more tricky, because a lot of them either have been cooked to death or have preservatives in them. The preservatives might inhibit your wine yeast. Some of the aseptically packaged concentrates have promise, though. I’ve used them a few times to pick up a five-gallon tutti-frutti that lacked zest.

If you want to try to use canned juice, buy some and drink it first to make sure you like it. If you think it tastes flat and metallic now, it’s going to taste really flat and metallic later on. Silk purses and sow’s ears and so forth.

A lot of the old British winemaking books from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s have exuberant recipes for canned juices, but I think much of the enthusiasm was due to the cheapness of the resultant wine. Wine and hard liquor are heavily taxed in Britain, and were thus expensive. Beer was cheap, and there was no tax on homemade wine. Also, frozen fruit juice was not widely available at the time.

If you think the juice has any preservative in it, heat it up gently on the stove for a few minutes (do not boil) and let it cool down again. Heating up is NOT a foolproof way of getting rid of the preservatives, but it ought to improve your fighting chances.

CANNY APPLE WINE

48 oz. canned or bottled apple juice (any brand)

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

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

1 gallon of water, boiled and cooled while covered

1 packet of wine yeast (champagne or Montrachet)

1 teaspoon pectic enzyme (optional but recommended) water

5 Campden tablets (optional but recommended)

Proceed as you did for the frozen apple juice in Chapter 2, merely adding less water to the mixture, since you already have it in the apple juice. It should ferment out just as fast as the frozen variety.

If you want to try using other canned or bottled juices, go ahead, but I think the frozen ones are better. I don’t recommend canned orange or grapefruit juice at all, but if you insist on trying, use only twenty-four ounces or less. Sometimes you can find apricot nectar, or pear nectar, or even more rarely, canned cherry juice. Follow the basic apple juice recipe using anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight ounces of juice, and see what you get. You can never tell.

INSTANT WINE KITS

These are becoming available through gift catalogs that sell things other than winemaking supplies. You pour water into a mylar pouch, add yeast, and get grape wine a month or so later. They cost a lot, considering how much wine you get, and you don’t learn much by using them. They are also available for beer.

For the same amount of money you could set up your basic home winemaking equipment, or buy a couple of bottles of
really
nice commercial wine.

NON-INSTANT WINE KITS

In Europe, many non-instant wine kits are available, especially for varietal grape wines. Some of them make excellent wines. They are now catching on here, too.

A good wine supply store will sell you the kit, which usually includes the grape concentrate, the proper yeast, instructions, etc. for forty to sixty dollars. Many places also sell a kit that includes the basic equipment you need plus the ingredients for making wine for under one hundred dollars. They want you to succeed so you will come back!

ONWARD

You can continue to use this simple method for making wine, or you can go a step further and use real fruit and more sugar in a two-stage fermentation process. I’ll give you directions in the next chapter. It really isn’t that much more difficult, and it is a heck of a lot more rewarding. I still make simple juice wines upon occasion, strengthening the alcohol content by using more juice and more sugar. I also combine the two techniques quite often, as
I will discuss later, in the section called The BIG TIME, where I will explain how to combine fruits, grains, vegetables, and methods.

The lists of equipment, terms, and ingredients in the next section may seem a little intimidating, but look them over while you are making a few wines from this first section, and familiarize yourself with them before you go on to making whole fruit wines. You’ll quickly realize there isn’t anything truly complicated; it just takes some time to describe some simple techniques. You’ll be in the swing of it very quickly.

Welcome to home winemaking!

Part Two

Intermediate Winemaking

CHAPTER THREE

Equipment

(The Whole Fruit and Nothing but the Fruit Except for Everything Else That Goes In)

T
his section brings you up to using whole fruits and vegetables in your recipes. It’s not that much more trouble, but you have to go through two stages of fermentation, and you need more equipment. I think you will like the results.

When you made the fruit juice wines in the previous chapters, that first, frothy stage of fermentation was where the yeast did most of its work. The second, quieter stage took longer but was necessary for the yeast to consume the last bits of sugar and die off.

When working with whole fruits and vegetables, we break the stages in two more completely, using the first, fast fermentation to extract sugars, flavors, and color from the fruits and vegetables. This is called
fermenting on the fruit
.

In the second stage of fermentation, the used-up material is discarded in order to let the fermentation proceed without the danger of producing off flavors from any solids.

The first stage is done in a large, sanitized food-grade plastic bin with a lid and a fermentation lock. It takes two weeks or less. The second stage happens in a glass container, again using a fermentation lock to guard against spoilage. It can take from two to six months for the fermentation to complete. After that, the racking and bottling procedures are no different from what you have already learned.

Please be sure to read over the descriptions of equipment, ingredients, and procedures before moving on to the actual recipes. To ensure consistent results, you need to understand more about what you are doing, what is happening, and what it is happening with. An hour or two of your time now will pay off in good results later.

These recipes are fairly simple; most require only one kind of fruit so that you will become familiar with the basic process of fermenting on the fruit. Besides, you need to learn the characteristics of each of the fruits and vegetables when they are translated into wine.

For example, strawberry wine sounds very romantic. It’s the stuff of old folk songs and legends: lips like strawberry wine, etc. In your mind you probably have an imaginary taste for it already.

Believe me, your fantasy is going to differ from the actual wine, which will be drier, lusher, more acidic, or aromatic than you thought. This is not bad. In fact, it’s quite good. But it isn’t what you would think. It doesn’t even look the way people think it should, usually being more straw color than berry.

Take carrot wine, for instance. I had no idea what to expect the first time I made it. I did it because it was winter, carrots were cheap, and I wanted to experiment. So I combed through the old recipes, and made some. Six months later, when I bottled the stuff, I was not pleased. It didn’t taste like much. Certainly not like carrots. Six months later, same results.

My brother, the Ph.D., was visiting and insisted on taking a bottle back home with him. Over a year later, I was visiting him. He remembered the carrot wine and brought it up from the basement. “What’s up, Doc?” I cried, “I’ve tried it, and it’s not very good. Just throw it out.”