Joy of Home Wine Making

The Joy of Home Winemaking

Terry Garey

Dedication

This book is for

Dennis Lien
for the usual, the unusual,
and most of the good jokes

and for
Joel Rosenberg
with much gratitude

Epigraph

Do the best you can and don’t worry!

—My grandmother Garey
during an earthquake

List of Illustrations and Photographs

Racking the wine

Corker

Corking

Level of wine in fermenter

Large equipment

Assorted small equipment

Hydrometer and water tension

Mr. Ick

Equipment in use in the cellar

Part of my wine cellar

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations and Photographs

Introduction

Part One:
Beginning Winemaking

Chapter 1:
A Brief History of Winemaking

Chapter 2:
The First Gallon

Part Two:
Intermediate Winemaking

Chapter 3:
Equipment

Chapter 4:
Ingredients

Chapter 5:
Fresh Fruit Wines

Chapter 6:
Wines from Canned Fruits, Concentrates, and Dried Fruits

Chapter 7:
Vegetable Wines

Chapter 8:
Herb, Flower, Seed, and Grain Wines

Part Three:
Advanced Winemaking, Or The Big Time

Chapter 9:
Advanced Techniques and Equipment

Chapter 10:
Advanced Wines

Chapter 11:
Fortified and Sparkling Wines

Chapter 12:
Extra Helpings

Appendices

A:
Winemaking Guidelines and Cheat Sheets

B:
Troubleshooting: When Good Wines Go Bad

C:
Glossary

D:
Bibliography

E:
Miscellaneous Information

F:
Wine Supply Addresses

G:
On-line

Indexes

Subject Index

Recipe Names Index

Recipe Ingredients Index

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

I
f you can follow a simple recipe, you can make wine. You can make it in the tiniest kitchen apartment. You don’t need much specialized equipment. You don’t have to be Italian or French or a chemist. You have to be an adult over eighteen or twenty-one (depending on where you live) with a sense of adventure, curiosity, and patience.

Home winemaking is easy, as I’ll show you. Do yourself a favor, though, and read through at least the first three chapters of this book before you start. Nothing wastes more time than undue haste.

Here’s how I got started.

Many years ago I spotted some Danish strawberry wine in a shop. I was young, but I had had good wine and knew what it should taste like. My father bought the pretty bottle for me, since I wasn’t yet twenty-one, but he cautioned me that I wouldn’t like it.

Opening and tasting the strawberry wine was a disappointment. I won’t call it a bitter disappointment, because it was so sweet that it made my teeth curl. My father laughed. So did I. As I remember, my grandmother used it over vanilla ice cream so it wouldn’t go to waste. It lasted a long time!

Many years after that a friend came to dinner, bearing with him a bottle of homemade raspberry wine. Friends of his in the Santa Cruz mountains had made it.

I trusted his judgment. We opened the wine.

When I read about wine as a child, I imagined it tasting a particular way. The little sips my parents gave me of what they were drinking were nice, but not what I had imagined.

The raspberry wine from Santa Cruz was the wine of my dreams. It smelled softly of ripe raspberries and was dry, clean; flavorful, yet subtle. I instantly felt that this was the way I had always dreamed wine could be.

Please understand that I love grape wines. I honor and respect the winemaking traditions of the world. It is true however that I tend to drink American wines over French and German due to habit, chauvinism, and economy. It is also true that I have no illusions about my chances of duplicating Bordeaux in my basement. But that’s okay. I don’t want to. The Bordeaux region does what it does just fine.

Fruit wines are my first love.

A year after I moved to the Midwest from California I made my first gallon of apple wine with a recipe a friend had given me. It featured frozen apple juice and lemonade. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good.

Another friend sipped some of it. The next time I saw him he handed me a packet of champagne wine yeast and said, “Try this on the next batch.” He was a beer brewer and knew that yeast was important, you see. I had been using bread yeast.

So I tried it. He was right; it was much better. He suggested I learn to bottle. I did. He was right; the wine was better yet.

More than a year after my first excursions, I decided to try to make wine out of real fruit.

It wasn’t easy. I didn’t know anyone who did it, and couldn’t find any current information about making wine. My partner found some old British books dating from the 1960s and 1970s in used bookstores. Painstakingly, I cobbled together a method, crossed it
with what I had already learned on my own, and there it was, my first batch of strawberry wine: dry, a bit thin, but quite nice, thank-you very much. And a year after that, the first of the raspberry was born. I had done it! I had made raspberry wine!

I’ve made apple wine, grape, cranberry, raspberry, mint, potato, carrot, raisin, dandelion, blueberry, pineapple sage, and all sorts of other wines from fruits, flowers, herbs, and combinations of fruits. I’ve made mead, melomel, cyser, and metheglin. The most popular ones among me and my friends are raspberry, apple, strawberry, carrot, and blueberry, made from the whole fruit, on the dry side. And the fruit melomels.

You may gag at the idea of carrot wine (it’s OK, I’m used to it), but I assure you, it’s wonderful. It doesn’t taste like carrots, oddly enough, but vaguely like a dry Rhine.

What wine goes with what? Almost any homemade wine will go with Chinese food, light pastas, salads, sandwiches, chicken, salmon, and vegetable dishes. Almost any homemade wine will go with anything, although you meat eaters may find you still need a rich red grape wine for beef, which is difficult to achieve with non-vinifying fruits unless you use grape concentrate or a grape wine kit.

You can also cook with homemade wine.

For Chinese cooking, instead of sherry I’m still using a batch of raisin wine I made five years ago. The older it gets, the better it is.

A dash of raspberry or apricot wine in the sauté pan at the right moment does wondrous things to pork, turkey, chicken, fish, and vegetables.

I’ve used my homemade wines in desserts, mustards, sauces, and salad dressings.

And, last but not least, I give it to people who I know will appreciate it.

Do I sell it? Absolutely not. Which brings us to the next section.

IS THIS LEGAL?

It sure is. By federal law you are allowed to make 100 gallons of wine a year for your own consumption, and 200 gallons a year if you are a household of two or more adult people. You don’t have to fill out a form or anything. You can just do it.

Be aware, however, that there are some states and counties where the regulations are different. Check with the local authorities to be absolutely sure winemaking is legal where you live.

Under no circumstances should you sell or distill wine.

If you eventually find that your enthusiasm knows no bounds, you can get a commercial license for a winery, of course.

DEFINE YOUR TERMS

Wine, technically, is fermented grape juice with an alcohol content of 8-14 percent. The grape is the only fruit that is sweet enough to provide enough sugar and acid on its own (and in the olden days, its own yeast) to make that much alcohol.

Wine yeasts will tolerate only 14 percent alcohol content before they are killed off. Fortified wines, such as sherry and port, are made with yeasts that can survive up to about 18 percent: then the wine is “fortified” with brandy to bring the alcohol content up to 20-25 percent to make it more stable.

In this book most of what we will be discussing we will call fruit wines, made of fruit and sugar.

True grape wines are made using nothing but grapes and yeast with no added sugar. It takes a lot of grapes, around eighteen pounds per gallon. Go to the store and start loading up a scale with table grapes and then imagine that in your kitchen. The cost is also prohibitive unless you grow your own wine grapes.

Fruit wines are made with smaller amounts of fruits and added sugar. They are less expensive and less trouble to make. Some people scorn fruit wines and call them false wines, claiming only grape wine can be called wine. I disagree and refuse to quibble. I make wine.

Fruit and vegetable wines are not easily bought commercially. That’s one of the reasons I decided to learn to make them, and it’s where most of my experience lies. In this book I’ll give you a basic recipe for making true grape wines, but it is not the true focus of this book.

If we make wine with honey and nothing else, it’s mead; if we make fruit wine with honey, it’s melomel; if we make herbal wine using honey, it’s metheglin.

In most of my wines, I tend to use a bit of honey in addition
to sugar. Though I’m not sure what most people would call it, I call it wine.

There is a sort of murky area between ciders and beers and ales and wines in the 6-8 percent alcohol area, but what we want here is something that will keep for several years, and you need a higher alcohol content for long-term storage.

STYLES OF WINES

Most people in the United States are familiar with three basic commercial wine styles: red, white, and sparkling. Everyone has heard of French wines, Italian wines, and California wines. Maybe they’ve explored some of the German wines, and Hungarian.

Grape wines have a tremendous range. Go to a liquor store that specializes in wines, and take a tour. You’ll find everything from the lightest white to the heaviest red. There are wines meant to be drunk with food, aperitif wines (wines to spark the appetite), ports, sherries, Tokays, dessert wines, and celebratory sparkling wines.