Joy of Home Wine Making (37 page)

I suspect oat wine would have a bit TOO much body, as would flax or chia wine. There are some beer recipes that use a bit of oatmeal to thicken them up, though.

NOTE: You can use half a cup of Wheat Chex or Shredded Wheat or a piece or two of toast per gallon to give a wine a little color. Make the toast the usual way (don’t use butter!) or put the cereal in a fine mesh nylon straining bag the first day or so of the primary ferment. It will give the wine a nice color and a little body. The darker the toast, the darker the wine. This technique is especially nice for coloring a sherry-type wine. Don’t leave the cereal or toast in for more than a day or two. Eggs and hash browns are right out!

People used to use toast to float the bread yeast they used in homemade wines. Of course the toast sank as it got wet, but it also provided nourishment for the yeast. I don’t recommend this use for the toast—I merely mentioned it for its historical interest.

PART THREE

Advanced Winemaking, Or The Big Time

CHAPTER NINE

Advanced Techniques and Equipment

T
his section deals with more complicated wines, but nothing you can’t handle, I assure you! You now know the basic steps of home winemaking and the basic flavors you can achieve. You know what an apple wine should taste like, as well as raspberry, carrot, herb, and flower wines.

Now we will start to play around. Think about those basic wines you have made. Invite a few friends over, open some bottles, sip, taste, and think.

What would happen if you combined that apple that was a bit sweet with the carrot that was a bit dry? Mix up a glass and try it. What do you think? Is it better? Is there more balance? Is it simply insipid? Less apple, more carrot? More apple, less carrot?

When you bottled your wines, I hope you followed my advice and bottled several different wines at the same time, creating some Mystery Wines with the leftovers. Try a few of those.

What have you got? A few mistakes, for sure, but maybe some surprising successes. Go back through your notes.

Say one bottle is one-third cherry and two-thirds raspberry. The cherry may have seemed harsh when you bottled it, but then smoothed out delightfully later. Say the raspberry had good full flavor but was thin. Together in this one bottle, what are they like now? Is it a happy marriage? Is it OK, but not something you’d try again except for the luck of the draw at bottling time?

If you like it, try to think why, and keep good notes.

Blending is an art. In the big wineries, blending helps balance the final product into a wine with a predictable taste and body. Say the grapes from one vineyard tend to be thin and acid with a high alcohol content, while those from another vineyard are lush and fruity, with low alcohol. Do they bottle the results as two products, one thin and acid, and the other lush and fruity? No, they blend them to achieve a nice middle ground at 12 percent alcohol. They can make much more money that way. They even blend various vintages, which evens out the whims of Mother Nature from year to year. Certain types of grapes must be used to some extent for the different varieties of wine, but they can mix good grapes with indifferent grapes of another variety, and still call the result a Cabernet, as long as they stay within certain guidelines.

In the smaller wineries, blending serves a similar purpose, but with some different twists. If one part of the vineyard turns out grapes with less sugar and flavor and another part turns out loud, full-bodied ones, blending might save the day. Or the vineyard might decide to sell the insipid grapes and bottle only the wine from the better grapes and hope they mellow out.

More typically, they will blend GOOD kinds of wine together, allowing for the restrictions of vintage, of course, to produce an even better wine.

You, as the proprietor of your little winery, can do any of the above and more! You can also enrich the basic wines you make with a little more fruit, or a little more sugar. You can add spices, herbs, flowers, a touch of citrus.

There is also another way. How about starting off with two kinds of fruits in the first place? All through the middle section I showed you a few options, adding some spices, using raisins,
grape concentrate, or honey to make the wine fuller and richer. In this section, you can really go to town!

But first, there are a few things we ought to discover and reemphasize.

ACID

So far I’ve been giving you a set amount of acid to add to the various wines, and I will continue to do so. However, acid content varies considerably even within one kind of fruit, and you are much better off TESTING the acid content of the must with an acid test kit, and then ADJUSTING the acid level by either adding or subtracting acid.

Almost any wine supply place has acid test kits. They are readily available by mail, as well. They usually cost less than ten dollars. Follow the directions that come with the kit.

It is generally agreed that fruit wines should be at no more than about 0.60 percent, red grape wines 0.65 percent, white grape wines 0.75 percent, sherry 0.50 percent, port 0.50 percent, and champagne 0.75 percent.

There are some fruits with which it is easy to go over the mark: all currants, lemons, limes, rhubarb, and quinces. Pie cherries, gooseberries, wild plums, and raspberries are up there, too, but not as high.

To avoid having too much acid in a wine, you can limit the amount of high-acid fruit you use; use more water; use food-grade calcium carbonate (or
chalk
) to the must. You can use a high-acid fruit with a low-acid fruit, as well, in order to balance the acid.

Remember that it is always easier to
add
ingredients than to try to remove them once they’ve been added.

Personally, since I am lazy and hate extra steps, I simply limit how much of the high-acid fruits I use. This is easy, since I don’t have access to huge amounts of currants or quinces where I live, though rhubarb wine is a lovely thing. Luckily, I prefer my rhubarb wine on the light side. I also like lemon and lime as flavorings, not as the major fruit in a wine.

Food-grade chalk is available at most wine supply stores or mail order supply houses. Adding chalk is not difficult—it is merely an extra step. You figure out how much acid there is in the must,
and figure out how much chalk you must add. There is a limit to how much you can get away with, of course.

With
food-grade
chalk, the general idea is that using ¼ ounce per gallon (about 4 teaspoons) will subtract about 0.25 percent acid per gallon. It is best to use it before fermentation, when you must add the chalk to the must in a sanitized primary fermentation bin. Don’t use more than an ounce of chalk per gallon. It takes about 24 hours to work, and you must stir every three to four hours. It will produce a lot of foam. Rack off the must into a clean container, leaving the sediment behind, and proceed with fermentation.

Most of the time, your test kit will tell you to add acid when making fruit and vegetable wines. Testing gives you more knowledge and control over your wines.

YEASTS

Once again, try using the various yeasts on the market, and find out which ones best suit the wines you make. You can’t go really wrong, but you can certainly improve your product. Study books on grape wines, and learn the characteristics of the different yeasts to better match the various kinds to your fruit and vegetable wines. I especially encourage you to use mead yeasts, and port and sherry yeasts for those particular wines.

Keeping a variety of yeasts on hand isn’t always practical, though the dry granular yeasts are easy to store and not very expensive. Getting a sudden windfall of red wine grapes and only having champagne yeast on hand is not a disaster, but having a more suitable red wine yeast would be better.

Some people like to culture their own yeasts, though it is not advised. It’s like San Francisco sourdough bread. You can buy the starter, take it back to wherever you live, and make a batch of bread with it. It will come out with that wonderful San Francisco tang. The second batch will be weaker, and by the third batch, the local sourdough yeasts will have taken over the culture and the San Francisco yeasts will have died out.

Some wineries in California are experimenting with local wild yeasts to see what they get. I suppose you could, too, but be prepared for disappointments. Nonetheless, some mead makers and cider makers are enthusiastic about wild yeasts.

SANITATION AND CLEANLINESS

Don’t get sloppy just because you think you know what you are doing. Remain in a Zenlike state of humbleness, appreciating Mother Nature and her urge to nurture yeast and fruit, while remembering that she also loves molds and vinegar entities just as much. Clean everything, and sanitize everything. Then, if you do slip up or take a chance in a moment of madness, it might not turn out too badly.

It is a good idea to get rid of the plastics you are using every once in a while and buy new ones. Look at your primary fermenters. Some grungy scratches here and there? What about your siphoning and racking tubes? Can you still see through them? What’s that weird stuff along the side of that tube? How long has it been there?

You don’t have to throw your old containers away. Recycle or reuse. They can still be useful as bins and planters in the garden, or for storing things like toys, extra clothes that are out of season, and hobby items like your prize-winning rubber band collection. If you turn a primary bin upside down and pad and cover it, you can even make a footstool or a small occasional table. No one will know what’s under there!

Racking tubes are great to have in the trunk of a car to help out another motorist or winemaker who has been stranded. You can use them for siphoning rainwater out of a barrel. Tacked up horizontally at short intervals in the garage they make good holders for shovels, rakes, and the like. Use your imagination.

MORE EQUIPMENT AND SOME REFINEMENTS

If you want to make more than five gallons of wine at a time, all you really have to do is get a bigger primary fermenter and some more carboys.

If you are getting seriously serious and have the room, bigger vats are available in the small winery market. There are instruments and other items that are impractical on the scale of most home winemaking but which make sense in a larger operation, such as a club.

Some people stay with fruit wines, others branch out into grape wines. There’s a whole world out there waiting to be explored. I
don’t have the room or the expertise to cover everything about it in this book, of course, but you can grow your own wine grapes, you know, even in northern and southern climes. Even a few vines can produce a nice quantity of wine. Consult your agricultural extension service.

Other books delve more seriously into the chemistry behind making wine. I’ve just given a general overview. The science of winemaking is fascinating. Check out the library at your local agricultural college for further information.

CHILLPROOFING

Commercial winemakers, as well as some serious amateurs, put their wines through a simple process called chillproofing. After the wine is racked, but before it is bottled, the wine is stored at a temperature just above freezing for a period of about two weeks. This allows part of the tartaric acid to precipitate out, and it helps to smooth high-acid wines. It also aids in stabilizing the wine.

If you live in a cold climate, chillproofing can be done in a cold part of the garage or basement at certain times of the year. Otherwise, you can use an old refrigerator.

It’s a nice refinement, but not totally necessary. You will still make perfectly good wine without chillproofing.

FINING AND FILTERING

Two other things you should consider doing are fining and filtering your wine. Most of the commercial wineries do so, although some of the fancier labels don’t.

Fining isn’t strictly necessary. Peasants and home winemakers have gotten along without it for thousands of years. If you rack your wine well, bottle it properly, and drink it within a few years, your wine will be perfectly OK for home use.

However, many people feel that fining and filtering are a big help, even on the small home winemaking scale. They are certainly necessary if you are going to be entering wine competitions.

Fining involves adding a substance to the wine after the fermentation is finished. The substance soaks up sediment and impurities and sinks to the bottom of the wine with them. This helps stabilize the wine and clears out dead yeasts that can sometimes give your wine an off taste over time. The old books had many esoteric
methods of fining, which sometimes took all the taste, as well as any sediment, out of the wine. Whenever you see a mention of egg whites or isinglass, or even ox blood, that’s what they were talking about.

Isinglass, gelatin, silica soda, and bentonite are all substances used for fining. There are several commercial brands available, and they all come with instructions. The brands change, and might be available in all areas, so I won’t go too much into the merits of each kind. Sparkolloid and PolyClar are two of the fairly common ones. They both should be removed by filtering, although it isn’t strictly necessary with Sparkolloid, just better aesthetically.