Wine Misadventures

I like everything about Autumn, and this one is no exception. My mood has been iffy, but the weather and color (and pumpkins) are only helping.

We finished the wine yesterday. The learning curve is steep on this undertaking. I'm glad I did it, and I hope to do it again. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that this attempt will turn out all right.

We had trouble with our bucket throughout the experiment. The spout leaked the whole time. Just a smidge - but every day, more wine escaped around the rim of the spout. We tried to fix it every time we racked the wine, but it did no good.

Nevertheless, the wine tastes good. It's not great...  but I've had worse. It will be really cool if it improves with age.

Bottling wine happens in a series of steps. We had lots of instructions - the book that came with the kit, plus articles I got online - but they all neglected the same step.

How do you get the wine from the bucket... to the bottle?

Siphon, probably. But we could both just picture us holding the hose in the bottle as it fills up, and not being able to stop the flow, and ending up with wine all over the kitchen.

But let me backtrack. First, I've been saving wine bottles, washing them and removing the labels. It turns out we only wanted dark bottles, since our wine is red. In order to sterilize the bottles, I did some dishwasher voodoo, trying to stack as many bottles as possible in positions that would allow them to drain, AND not get hit by the rotating blade.

That was a hassle. But easier than boiling the bottles.

When it came time to fill the bottles, we moved our bucket to the counter, placing it on top of an upside pan, to give us room for the bottles under the spigot (in the sink).

Then I made a mistake - something like the hundredth mistake of the process. I tasted the wine and added sugar to adjust the flavor. It was REALLY tart. It's still tart, but much better. This is very dry wine. But my mistake was that I should have added some potassium sorbate to the wine, before I added sugar.

Once the sugar's in the wine, it's too late to add the potassium. It's purpose is to prevent any further fermentation, but it can't stop it if it's already started. If you add sugar first... well.

So what did I do? Not a damn thing. I'm tired by this time. I'm pretty sure the wine will be a failure anyway. (Perhaps we should refer back to my iffy mood mentioned earlier). So screw it - we're bottling this wine.

We did it the cheating way, by placing the bottles under the spigot and letting the wine run into the bottles. There was no sediment - this wine is lovely and clear. We filled up 13 1/2 bottles. Quite cool.

The next adventure was corking. We had mushroom corks, which came in the wine kit, the kind with a plastic lid attached. Following all the myriad instructions, we boiled some water, removed it from the heat, and soaked the corks for a couple of minutes. Then we began inserting corks into bottles.

The corks came right back out.

Seriously. They just worked their way right up, refusing to STAY in the bottle. Air pressure, y'know. Further research allowed as to how this was quite normal behavior for mushroom corks, and one must apply a "trick". The trick is to place a flexible wire in the bottle (keeping hold of the end), insert the cork, and while holding the cork firmly in place, draw out the wire. This creates a path for the air to escape the bottle, and allows the cork to seal as the air escapes.

Excuse me, but you do realize you can't stick any old wire in your bottle of wine? None of the instructions said so, but I wasn't grabbing a wire from the garage and throwing it in my bottle without sterilizing it first. This meant I had to boil more water and cook the wire for several minutes.

I sure hope that damn thing got sterilized.

But it worked beautifully. Except... you know those plastic lids attached to the corks? You can't let stay in the water too long. Or let the water be too hot. Those lids melt. We lost a few corks to this phenomenon. Some of the corks seemed to work okay, but they look strange.

Anyway. We have thirteen bottles filled and corked. Next step: shrinkwrap around the cork and neck of the bottle. These also came in our kit, and it turned out to be the funnest part of the job. We boiled water (again), and placed the gold wrapper over the top of the bottle. A rubber band is attached from top to bottom of the bottle to hold it in place. Then the bottle is turned upside down and lowered into the water for about 3 seconds.

Lessons Learned here: The water must remain boiling the entire time. Cooler water will not work.
The water must be deep enough to cover the entire wrapping. Submerge it all the way.

After a few more "mistakes," our bottles were all filled, corked, and wrapped. They look almost like real bottles of wine!

Last step: the label. Yes, these also came with the kit. They're hokey, but so what. We fiddled around with the idea of writing out our information and printing it on mailing labels to stick on the fancy labels. I think of things like this because I have awful handwriting. Rick has beautiful handwriting, but I felt bad asking him to write out 13 labels.

But in the end, that's what we did. Here's the result:

The labels say:

It's a Marickal!
Plum Wine
2010

"Marickal" is a combination of our names, and a play on the word miracle, which I'm sure you figured out. We were so surprised to get this far. We have a couple of bottles to use as beta testers. If the wine in those holds up (i.e., doesn't grow mold or something over the next month or so), we'll give the wine out as gifts.

Got any wood to knock on?

Wine Report

It's been three weeks since we racked the plum wine, so it was time to re-rack, and lose some sediment. It was also the Big Check - is it wine, yet?

Oh, yes.

After we siphoned it into a new bucket, we took a taste. It's very dry, which I think is wonderful. I prefer dry wines, and I was afraid this would be too sweet, since it started with plums.  But, no. It's VERY dry.


I think it's almost perfect, but Rick wasn't sure. According to the instructions, if we want it sweeter, we can add sugar just before we bottle it. So we'll decide then.

It's also done fermenting. The SG is 1.006, which means there's almost no sugar left. What's the alcohol content? Well, that's an inaccurate guess, due to my faulty record-keeping. We need to know the starting SG, and I forgot to write that down.

But I do know it was in the normal range for starting wine. So we have a range of 7%-12% alcohol. I think it's at a reasonable level, because what we tasted (about a 1/4 cup each) was enough to provide the beginnings of a tipsy feeling.

I'm excited about it. We'll let it sit for a month or two more, to get rid of more sediment. Depending on how clear it looks at that point, we might bottle it.

Next year, I'll make an effort to use all our plums and make a bunch of wine. This is great stuff.

Yum Wine

The plum wine I started last week has been merrily fizzing and popping away in the guest room, with lovely scum appearing in the mixture. The bacteria are growing!

Yesterday, we washed and sterilized our equipment in preparation for our first racking. Assembly of the wine bucket was not an easy thing. The silly nozzle that goes in the hole near the bottom of the bucket just would not stop leaking. We did all we could, which involved tightening the bolt with pliers, taking it apart and putting it back together, then attacking it with pliers again. All of this required that we sterilize the bucket again, just to be safe.

It still leaks at a very slow rate - maybe a couple of drops a day. I'm not happy about this.

But we went ahead and siphoned the wine into the new bucket. First we lifted out the bag of pulp and squeezed out as much liquid as we could.  Then with the new bucket on the floor, we lifted the mixture onto a desk and siphoned away. This went much faster than I thought it would.

The wine is a lovely pink-red color, sort of like punch. We each took a taste and oh... this stuff is gonna be good. It's sweeter than a typical red wine, but it's not too sweet... I'd put in on a level with a dry Riesling, perhaps. We'll see what it's like after several months in the bucket.

For now, we wait about three weeks, then test the specific gravity. If it's where it should be, or whenever it's ready (I don't have the number in front of me right now), then we do a second racking. This will be done about every two months for six months. Then it can be bottled. It should be ready to drink at that point, but aging will only improve it.


Unfortunately, this means it won't be ready for Christmas presents. But if it's good enough, family and friends can look forward to a bottle or a chance to share it. Salud!




For the record: yesterday's SG was 1.020. According to our recipe, it should have been about 1.040. So we let it go a bit too long in the bucket, I guess. It appears I've made nearly every mistake in the book, but if yesterday's taste was an indication, everything is all right. Keepin' the fingers crossed!

I'm Not Lost, I'm Making Wine

Which is a real adventure.

I have to tell you, it's not easy decoding all the instructions for making wine. Maybe it's my age. I just can't comprehend things like I used to.

Anyway, I spent days reading various instructions, including the ones that came with the wine-making kit I ordered. But it took deeper research into the internets to find definitions and instructions. I mean, I need wine-making for dummies. For instance, exactly HOW does the airlock fit into the bucket? They assume I just know this.

I hate to disappoint them, but I've never attached an airlock in my life. Good thing my husband's an engineer.

Anyway, the whole point of this was to use up some of the millions of plums my trees have produced. I pulled twenty pounds from one tree yesterday, which was about all I could reach. But that's enough for five gallons of wine. Perfect!

So I carefully washed the equipment, then washed and pitted the plums. That's when it got fun. Perhaps I should mention that I had to change my blouse three times. And I WAS wearing an apron!

Too many instructions have a downside, and that's contradicitons. So some places said to boil the water, others seemed to indicate the water was cold (room temperature). This may be where I really screwed it up, but I won't know until later. It seemed to me that cold water would never dissolve the sugar, so I went and heated up the water. I put it all in a large bucket, with the addition of things like peptic enzyme, yeast energizer, and other mysterious stuff. Then I faced another challenge.

You're supposed to put the fruit in a mesh bag and submerge in the water mixture. Hey, you know mesh bags have holes in them, right? So how do I pour the (extremely juicy) fruit into the bag and transfer it to the bucket?

Yes, I did think about putting the empty bag in the bucket and pouring the fruit in. But the bag wouldn't stay open - it just wanted to fold over and lay in the water. My bowls of fruit were BIG and HEAVY. And I have arthritis.

The lesson: it's a two-person job. But I managed: I put the bag in my biggest skillet (large, with reasonably high sides), then poured one bowl of fruit into the bag. All the liquid immediately poured out of the bag of course, but the pan (just barely) contained it all. I transfered the bag and liquid to the bucket. With the weight of the fruit in the bag, it stayed upright in the water, and I was able to hold it open and pour in the second bowl. This involved not a little bit of pain in my hands, and just a little bit of spillage.

But it worked.  Here it is:

Does this look strange? I hope it doesn't. There's about three or four gallons of water with maybe 4 cups of juice and 7 1/2 pounds of sugar in that bucket. Along with all the pulp in the bag, of course. The big white spot is a reflection of the light in the ceiling.

Right now, the wine is in the guest room, where the temperature can be somewhat controlled. It's covered with a thin towel while the juice is sterilizing. This afternoon, I add the yeast. Then I wait a few days, I think. Back to the instructions!

As usual, I forgot to take pictures of each step. But honestly, this was MESSY! Taking pictures would have been difficult to do. Fun, though. Can't wait to taste the wine.