I don't remember if I actually did a post last fall about DH starting a batch of wine from our Concord grapes. I suspect I had planned to, and took some pictures intending to, but never got around to actually doing so. Anyhow. . .
We had a good crop of grapes last September. DS2 came and picked almost two bushel so that he could make some wine. And then DH and I picked another bushel-ish a week or so later (it was a busy time) when the grapes were almost to the overripe stage because after DS2 started his wine, DH decided he wanted to make some afterall.
For the first couple of weeks, I took a picture of the carboy the wine was fermenting in almost daily--I told you I had intended to make a blog post about it. My thought was to capture the day to day little changes in color, clarity and the process the grape must goes through on the way to becoming a ready to drink wine (which takes months). And then came deer hunting season and the holiday season and the winter weather of January. . .
All these months, the carboy sat on the kitchen counter in the same spot DH had set it back in September. He never did move it down to the basement so it could continue the process in darkness, which is highly recommended. Nope, it sat on the counter exposed to sunlight and fluctuating temperatures. For an engineer and a (home) brewer, sometimes his lack of adherence to proper lab procedure gives me fits. But, really, wine is a pretty easy thing to make; it's hard to ruin it. You either get wine, good wine, or great wine; you have to be pretty neglectful of cleanliness to get bad wine. This was clean, just not environmentally controlled.
This weekend he finally got around to racking it from the carboy (which is usually done after the first month, to get the wine out of the sediment for better clarity and flavor). He was going to do it near the end of January, but couldn't find the tubing that fits onto his racking cane. Then, he found the tubing, but it was pretty gross looking (old, probably not cleaned out the best last time it was used) and he threw it into the trash. Then he had a hard time finding tubing locally in the size he needed. But now he finally had new clean tubing of the right size, so the wine was removed from the carboy to the bottling bucket.
And from there he put it directly into wine bottles and corked them. Now the wine has been moved to the basement, where it's dark and the temperature doesn't fluctuate with how sunny the day is.
On first taste, it had a sorta tangy overtone that went away once you swallowed. But once the wine had been allowed to sit and 'breathe' for a few minutes, that weird tang had gone. It's not the bestest wine ever, but certainly not bad. I will say it has a totally different body and flavor compared to DH's first batch of wine from our grapes in 2023.
No comments:
Post a Comment