Washington Winemaker

Honey prices advanced in 2008, and last January it looked like we were in for more of the same in 2009. But it turns out that honey in December sold for about what it did in January. I now have my first full year of data on malt extract, and here the story is the same. With the exception of The Cellar’s liquid malt extract, which rose early, dry and liquid malt extract prices were unchanged last year. I started tracking malt extract, and other sweeteners, because they might be of interest to our home brewing friends and to provide some context. One hitch in my plan is that I moved during the year, and I no longer have convenient access to a Sam’s Club. Starting with 2010, I’ll be tracking Wal Mart’s prices instead. This means that for table sugar and maple syrup, I only have full year data from Costco. It looks like maple syrup dropped and table sugar rose, at the end of 2009, but with only one source I’m not sure we can make too much of that.

In the table below, I’ve included honey prices from March 2008, just before the surge, as well as January and December of 2009.

Where can you get the best deal on honey?

The packers offer slightly better prices on clover honey than Costco, but to get those prices you have to buy in 60 lb buckets and pay shipping. Costco lets you buy in smaller 6 lb jugs and avoid shipping charges by visiting their retail locations. The best price around is still Miller’s wildflower – a high quality honey at a great price. It’s also available as a pair of 3 lb jugs from Amazon, but at $3.71/lb this is a much more expensive option. It’s eligible for free shipping though, so if you don’t have access to an affordable local source like Costco, you don’t want to buy in 60 lb lots, and/or shipping for those heavy buckets would eat up any savings, then it might make sense for you.

Outlook for honey prices

In October, Kim Flottum forecast rising honey prices this winter:

So … in the short run, the price of honey this winter is probably going to go up some. Maybe a lot. And you may not be able to find local honey later this winter.

With a good idea of US honey production, the worst year ever, and reports that many other exporters are seeing poor crops, he expects a supply squeeze to boost prices. No sign of that, in the prices I track, as of January but it’s something to keep an eye on. Something else to keep an eye on is his assessment that Colony Collapse Disorder hit hard last year and reduced US producing colonies by over 13%. We haven’t seen much evidence that CCD has reduced the US colony count yet – did that change in 2009? The USDA will release their figures in February, and I’ll have more to say then.

For those who don’t know, Mr Flottum wrote the book on backyard beekeeping and edits Bee Culture Magazine. When he talks about beekeeping, the rest of us should listen.

Malt extract prices

Not much has happened in my first full year of tracking malt extract. You can still by liquid malt extract in bulk for $2.01/lb to $2.99/lb while bulk dry extract will set you back $2.52/lb to $4.66/lb. There isn’t anything special about the sources I track, except that I’ve bought from all of them: The Cellar Homebrew, Mountain Homebrew, The Grape and Granary, and Moor Beer.

Did you know that Chardonnay goes with poached eggs? I didn’t either. It was date night at the Washington Winemaker household, and that meant I needed to select a wine to go with dinner. The Lady of the House decided we were having eggs poached in mushroom soup. This is a new recipe for us from Morrison Wood’s With A Jug Of Wine. A great cookbook for a winemaker that, sadly, is out of print. His more recent Through Europe with a Jug of Wine is available and will probably end up in my library.

The Wine and Food Matcher

Alright, we were both excited about the recipe but what was I going to serve with it? If you can pair wine with breakfast cereal, then eggs ought to be doable. I needed some advice, though, and for that I turned to Natalie MacLean. She’s a respected wine writer and the author of Red, White, and Drunk All Over. The wine and food matcher on her homepage gives you suggested wine pairings if you pick a food or suggests foods for a particular wine.

Would you like Chardonnay with that?

For eggs, it suggested Chardonnay. It just so happens that I’ve been buying a lot of bargain Chardonnay that I really like – it holds it’s own against $15 bottles for a fraction of the price – so I uncorked a bottle. How’d it turn out? The eggs were terrific, so was the wine, and Natalie was right – they were great together.

As to having eggs for dinner, well those of us who think pizza is breakfast food can’t object too loudly …

The trick to making a good gift of homemade wine lies in seeing it objectively and seeing it the way other people do (not necessarily the same thing!). After doting over the yeast, balancing the must till it’s just so, and (im)patiently aging, you might have a hard time tasting your wine with a critical palate. I know I do.

How to tell if your homemade mead or wine is good enough

One way to get an objective look at your own wine or mead is to compare it against a known quantity in a blind tasting. Sometimes it’s pretty easy to decide what to compare it against. You want to know how good your homemade Chardonnay is? Taste it blind against a good commercial Chardonnay. It’s tougher when you want to test something more obscure.

Commercial meads are available, but I’ve been unimpressed by the ones I’ve tried. You could test your own mead against them. It might be better, though, to think about what food would pair well with it and test it against a good commercial wine that also goes with that food. For example, I served aged dry rhubarb wine with ham at Thanksgiving, and it was terrific. So a dinner party with ham could become a tasting party for rhubarb wine (tested against Chardonnay maybe?). There are lot of questions you won’t be able to answer in an apples to oranges comparison like that, but you should be able to answer, which one would I rather drink with ham?

Competitions are also a good way to get objective feedback, even if the feedback is just a score. They can be less work than a tasting party, but a good tasting party will be a lot more fun.

A gift of wine will tell a story: Make it a good one

Ok, you’ve done your taste tests and it isn’t just you – you’ve really got a good homemade wine and you want to make a gift of it. Like commercial wine that you give away, your gift of wine will tell a story. The story can’t be all about you. If it’s, “look at me!” or “see what I can do!” you might as well give away pictures of yourself – even good ones won’t make good gifts. If you know someone who’s started or genuinely interested in making their own mead or wine, then one of your own would make a great gift. Someone who really likes a kind of wine that’s hard to get would love to get a good homemade version. Scoring well in a competition also makes a good story, and I’m sure you can think of others.

A great wine needs a great label

I’ve written about why it’s important to make a good label for homemade wine before, and everything I said goes double for gifts. Why would the recipient think there’s something special about it if you don’t think it’s worth the effort to make a good label? You might even make special labels for wine or mead that you give away. Use it to help tell the story – did it win a blue ribbon at your state fair? Put that on the label!

Have you had a good (or bad) experience with homemade wine as a gift? I’d love to hear about it.

Wine can make a great gift. You’ve got to pick a good one, of course, and it has to be a style that your victim loved one enjoys, but there is more to it than that. I have a new favorite wine. I bought two cases in the past few months (that’s a lot for me), and I know people who like this style of wine. But I won’t give any of it away because it would make a terrible gift.

Every gift tells a story

My current favorite wine is inexpensive. If you saw the label, you’d probably recognize it and the first thing that would come to mind is how little it costs. If that’s what they think when they open your gift, they’ll mean it when they say, “you shouldn’t have!” It won’t matter if it blows away other wines at it’s price point (it does) and it won’t matter if it beats many mid-priced wines (it does that too), it will just be the cheap gift. And no, you can’t make it up in volume by giving them a lot of it.


Buying a good wine that costs more isn’t really enough. If you want to make someone happy with your gift it should tell a story. What kind of story? Let’s look at Wine Spectator’s top 100 wines of 2009. You can make a lot of valid criticisms about lists like that, but none of that criticism will matter if you bought someone the Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Columbia Valley Reserve 2005. You wouldn’t just be giving them a very good wine, you’d be giving them Wine Spectator’s Number One Wine of 2009. Now that’s a great story! Unfortunately the wine is sold out and very difficult to come by, so most people won’t be able to use this as practical advice. On the other hand, if you can get some, then not only would it be Wine Spectator’s top choice, but it would be Sold Out And Really Hard To Get!

A good story can be personal

A while back, I set out to find the best Washington State Lemberger. I couldn’t survey the 650+ wineries in the state, but I did my homework. I visited wineries and wine shops and talked to the owners, employees, and customers. I did some online research. Finally I had three Lembergers that I wanted to try. I arranged a tasting party and one of my guests, Chef Ralph, brought a fourth. We tasted, we took notes, we disagreed, we ate, we had a great time.

In the end, the Lady of the House and I had a new favorite Lemberger and it would be the perfect gift for a red wine drinker on my list. Not just a good red wine, not just a good wine from Washington, but my top pick after looking for the best Washington State Lemberger.

One story does not work for everyone

Except Chef Ralph. Neither of us knew this until all the wines were tasted, all the notes were taken, and all the wines were ranked, but he ranked my favorite (and I ranked his) dead last. I don’t know what that says exactly (we have different tastes? the wines were very close?) but if I bought it for him the story would be “his last choice.”

I’ll be using experiences like that to pick wines for people I know, and next week I’ll talk about giving homemade wine as a gift (no, I didn’t forget about that!)

Adding sweeteners and spices to wine then serving it hot – sounds a bit like herbal tea with alcohol, doesn’t it? – was something I never understood. I’m giving it another look this Christmas season because I happen to like herbal tea, it’s something new (to me anyway), and I’ve got some bland wine that I don’t know what to do with. I was excited when I made wine from supermarket grapes, but in the end I didn’t want to drink it. Sweetening didn’t help, but maybe mulling will.

Mulling Spices

In researching mulled wine (in cookbooks, Wikipedia, search engines, my Mom), the same ingredients keep coming up:

Also common are vanilla, nutmeg, ginger, and cardamon. You sometimes see pepper, peppercorns, nuts, and raisins too.

Making Mulled Wine

Dissolved sugar or honey in water (about half a cup to a cup – enough to dissolve and cover everything, but no more), bring to a boil, take off heat, add spices, and cover. If using citrus juice, use a little more sugar/honey and a little less water. Let sit on low heat for about 20 minutes. Strain and add wine. Heat the combined mixture (but don’t boil) and serve hot.

This ought to work just as well with mead or cider – maybe even beer.

You can omit the water and stir everything into the wine, then heat the wine – I’ve seen recipes take either approach. I prefer to do the dissolving and extraction separately to guard against boiling the wine.

Straining out the spices might be easier if you use a tea bag or tea ball.

Citrus juice might help by adding flavor if your wine is bland. If you’re going to be zesting, for mulled wine or anything else, a dedicated zesting tool is a godsend.

Final Thoughts

I’m excited about making mulled wine this year. I haven’t decided on a commercial mix or making it from scratch – maybe I’ll try both. I’d love to hear about your experiences with mulled wine – triumphs, disasters, better methods. If you’re having trouble finding supplies, check out my new mulled wine store.

Tags: nad

Click here for a larger image and technical details about the shot

I like to experiment. It’s a great feeling when a crazy idea turns into an enjoyable wine. Crazy ideas are unpredictable, though, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. The wine I made from store-bought tables grapes falls into the “don’t” category. What went wrong? Nothing.  I got a balanced dry wine with no faults or off flavors. But its so bland I don’t want to drink it. Sometimes sweetening can tease out a little fruitiness in a wine. I tried that and wound up with sweet bland wine that I still don’t want to drink.

Make Welch’s Wine Instead

If you’re looking for winemaking ingredients at the grocery store, go to the freezer section and buy concentrated frozen grape juice. It’s easier to make wine from frozen concentrate because you don’t have to process the grapes. It’s cheaper too:

I got six bottles, so that works out to just under $3/bottle for bland wine that I don’t like compared to under $1/bottle for a lively, enjoyable Welch’s wine.

Improving table grape wine

I know that some people regularly make wine from Thomson Seedless (Sultana) grapes, and they often cold soak to extract more flavor. If I make this again, I’ll probably do that. Fermenting on the skin, like a red wine, might be worth a try too. Another approach is to add flavorings: vanilla and chocolate extract come to mind. Have you had better luck making wine from grocery store grapes? I’d love to hear about it.

About the label

The best thing about this wine is the label, and I want to thank Mark Hammergren for letting me use his The Truckstop artwork. The idea for putting Lost’s Dharma logo on the wine came to me after I realized I couldn’t rescue this batch. Mark’s take on it combined femininity, humor, and a new Dharma station concept that’s perfect for this wine – thanks Mark!

Update 12/3/2009 – Can I fix it by making mulled wine?

If the problem is bland flavor, then maybe mulling spices will liven it up. Using spices like cinnamon, cloves, and citrus zest (ok, I don’t think zest is technically a spice) in wine, then serving it warm goes back a long way. I’ve never made mulled wine before, so I’m really excited about it – might be a new Christmas tradition for me!

Tags: nad

Maybe you sold your house, maybe you decided to rent a different apartment, but for whatever reason you’re moving. How do you transport your carboys and jugs without breaking them or spilling anything? I was in exactly that situation and I managed to get my fermenting and aging wine from the old house to the new house without incident. Here’s how I did it:

Bottle it!

By far the best way is to bottle your wine or mead, pack it well, and ship it. I was able to bottle some of my wine by moving day and I just turned that over to the movers. Most of it was in commercial wine boxes with cardboard dividers, but some of it was in ordinary moving boxes with each bottle wrapped in newspaper. However you do it, make sure the bottles are packed to they don’t move and that glass doesn’t touch glass.

Move the jugs in a cooler

I had quite a bit of aging/fermenting wine, and not a lot of free time. So by moving day I had a lot of 1-gallon jugs with airlocks that I needed to move. As with the bottles, packing the jugs so that glass does not touch glass and they don’t move will prevent breakage. But there will be bumps and there will be sloshing. That could lead to spilling and popped airlocks. One way to handle this would be to replace the airlocks with solid bungs and tape them into place, but even if you do this (I didn’t) you should still plan for spills.

I did this by packing the 1-gallon jugs into a large (37.5 gallon – 142 liter) cooler. It held all of my jugs, with airlocks, and I was still able to close the lid. Now the jugs were prevented from moving, protected from impact, and enclosed in a watertight cooler. The cooler went in the back of my SUV, and the jugs made the trip without breaks or leaks.

Use nested garbage bags to contain spills from a carboy

I had one carboy to move and no waterproof container to put it in, so I turned to large plastic garbage bags. I place the carboy into one bag, let’s call it the “bottom bag.” The other bag, cleverly named “top bag,” draped over the carboy. I tucked the top bag inside the bottom bag, then pulled the bottom bag up to enclose the carboy. Once I fastened the bottom bag in place with tape, even a violent spill would be contained.

The waterproofed carboy joined the large cooler in the back of my SUV, where I nestled it between boxes, towels, old clothes and whatever else was handy. After I was satisfied that it was well padded and immobile, I headed for my new home. Like the 1-gallon jugs, the carboy, and – more importantly – the blueberry mead inside it, arrived in fine shape.

There might be better ways of doing it, and I’d love to hear about them, but this is how I did it and it worked. Remember: immobilize, protect, and waterproof. It’s worth the effort so you can – and you really should – pop open some home made wine when you get to your new place!

Once upon a time, food and wine pairing was as simple as, “red wine with meat and white wine with fish.” Then I learned about full bodied whites that can stand up to meat and realized that it can get more complicated. Then I thought about Asian food and chocolate. After some work, I came up with good pairings for them and started to think I was doing pretty well.

Then I came across this video discussing wine pairing with breakfast cereal, and that’s when I gave up! He insists that it’s not a joke and he starts out with his favorite pairing, Cap’n Crunch with a $30 bottle of Riesling, and goes on to discuss two others.

I can’t say I’m convinced, but I know at least one “meal” with wine and cereal is in my future. Once she hears about it, no power in the universe will keep the Lady of the House from trying it. By comparison, it makes my Superbowl wine seem downright respectable – cheers.

Apple harvest has begun in my backyard, and that’s got me thinking about wine. I’ve made a lot of apple wine, and processed apples a lot of different ways. Blenders and juicers both work, but you have to chop all the apples and process them in batches. I’m can’t find the notes, but I remember using sugar extraction for one batch. The trouble with all of these methods is the chopping; it’s tedious and doesn’t scale well. What I’d really like is a way to process apples that’s quick, cheap, and easy.

So I’ve been on the lookout for other ideas, and that’s how I came across Luc Volders apple a day post. What I like about Mr Volders is that he doesn’t just take ideas at face value; he puts them to the test. In this post he rigorously compares several methods of juicing apples.

To me, freezing the whole apple offers a big payoff in convenience over the other methods and I think I’ll give that a try this year. He reported a 68% juice yield, which is slightly less than some of the other methods (70 – 74%). If I don’t have to chop all those apples, it’s a price well worth paying. I’ll probably modify his approach and freeze the apples without coring them, add pectic enzyme and sulfite as they are thawing and allow them to thaw without separating the free run juice. This way, the enzyme and sulfite can work on all the juice.

I’m excited about the new process, and I’ll write about how it works out. Right now, it’s time to pop the cork on one of last year’s bottles and hit the send button …

I was happy enough with the Fetzer Cabernet from Trader Joe’s to give another of their budget Cabernets a try. Like the Fetzer, this comes recommended by Jason, and it set me back $6.

Running the numbers

Couldn’t find any information about this wine, so the only reported measurement I have is 14.75% alcohol. My measurements are:

SG: 0.994, pH: 3.72, TA: 3 g/L

There aren’t many winemaking books that tell you to shoot for a pH of 3.7 or a TA of 3 g/L. What do you get when you put that together with high alcohol and low sugar?

An easy drinking red

“Buttery.” So said the Lady of the House, but I didn’t pick up on that. She didn’t say, but I could tell she was thinking, that it wasn’t the only thing I didn’t pick up on! But getting back to the wine, this is a simple big red that goes down easy. We both liked it with spaghetti and sausage, and I’m going to add it to my list of superbowl wines.

Tags: nad