Monthly Archives: November 2008

What’s Wrong With My Portuguese Floor Corker?

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I don’t remember when I bought my Portuguese floor corker, or even what it was like to cork bottles with my old double lever corker. Except that it was like air travel going from propellers to jet engines. Now my jet engine is making funny noises and doesn’t run as smoothly as it did when it was new. I used to (not) notice the smooth quiet action of the lever as I pulled it down, but now I the creaking sounds are unmistakable. How do you maintain a floor corker anyway?

Maybe I should read the instructions. It did come with instructions, sort of. There was a sticker on the side labeled “Instructions” that read:

Pour le bon fonctionement de cette machine nous recommandons de:
– ne pas tramper les bouchons
– bouchage a sec
– lubrifier le piston et les articulations
– nettoyer la machine apres usage
Made in Portugal

Here’s what Google Translate has to say about it:

For the smooth operation of this machine we recommend:
– Do not tramp caps
– Capping a sec
– Lubricated the piston and the joints
– Cleaning the machine after use
Made in Portugal

That’s a translation from French; the Portuguese translation came back almost the same as the original, so I think the instructions are in French. Any idea why they tell us, in English, that the machine was made in Portugal and then go to the trouble of translating the – very terse – instructions into French? So from the creaking sound and from, ahem, carefully reading the instructions, I’ve decided I need to lubricate my Portuguese floor corker.

Far more helpful was this forum thread on WinePress. They may not be addressing the same problem I’m having (or even the same corker, but the Italian and Portuguese models are very similar) because they focus on the pivot pin. I notice the noise almost goes away when I take out the removable jaws, so I think that’s where my problem is. At least I hope so, I don’t see how to get at the pivot pin to lubricate it. If I am to lubricate the jaws, I’ll want to do it with a food grade lubricant. This is something I don’t know a lot about, so I’ll be off giving myself a crash course in lubricants. In the meantime, I’d love to hear any suggestions you might have.

Boiling Mead Experiment: The recipe

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This is for Medsen Fey, and anyone else, who wanted to know the recipe I used in my boiling mead experiment. I want to describe what I did and why. If you think I’ve left anything out, please ask! Good feedback here can improve future experiments – and not just mine. I’d really like to see others run similar trials.

Ingredients

2 kg (4.4 lb) heather honey from Apicoltura Dr. Precia
1.25 gallon (4.7 liters) water
0.5 tsp Yeast Nutrient
1.5 tsp tartaric acid in two additions post fermentation
1 tsp Cream of Tartar
Premier Cuvee yeast

Boiled Mead Procedure

Bring water to a boil, take it off heat, dissolve honey, boil 10 minutes, then cool in a water bath. Pour it into the fermenter.

Dissolve nutrient and cream of tartar in a small amount of water, then add to the fermenter.

Hydrate yeast in 1/4 cup (60 ml) warm water for five minutes, then add 1/4 cup must. When the starter is active, add 1/2 cup more must. When this 1 cup starter is active, pitch it into the fermenter.

No-boil Mead Procedure

Heat water to 180F (82C), take it off heat and dissolve honey, then cool in a water bath. Pour it into the fermenter.

Dissolve nutrient and cream of tartar in a small amount of water, then add to the fermenter.

Add 1/2 cup fermenting must from boiled mead to the fermenter.

Notes

I made the boiled mead one day earlier than, and pitched 1/2 cup of it into, the no-boil mead. I think I must have done this just so I wouldn’t be doing all the work on a single day. It would have been better to make up one double-sized batch, split it into two, boil and cool one, add the nutrient & cream of tarter to each one at the same time, then pitch the yeast into each one from the same starter.

I started this experiment on 2/26/2006, and I didn’t have a pH meter or acid test kit then. I checked the pH with pH paper and recorded a value of 4.2 for each one. It’s very difficult to get good results with pH paper, so take these values with a grain of salt (and a large margin of error). If you can afford (both the monetary cost and the trouble of maintaining) it, then buy a pH meter. You won’t regret it. If you must use pH papers, then use them properly.

Honey and mead are weakly buffered. That is, a small addition of acid will result in a large change in pH. If pH falls too far, it can inhibit the yeast and result in a stuck fermentation. I add cream of tartar to most of my plain meads because Roger Morse recommended it as a way of improving a mead’s buffering capacity. I honestly don’t know how well this works, but none of my meads have had a “pH crash” the way my Oregano Wine did.

I made these meads dry for several reasons. First of all, I like dry meads and I wanted to see how boiling would affect the meads I drink. It wasn’t entirely selfish, though. Sweetness can cover up faults, and if boiling did introduce off flavors (that was one of the claims I was testing) I didn’t want them to slip by unnoticed. Finally, sweetening is an extra step, and that makes it one more opportunity to make a mistake. Fewer steps, fewer mistakes, more reliable experiments – I’ll drink to that!

I didn’t add sulfite initially, but I did at the first racking and every other racking after that. This is a lot like my normal routine of sulfiting to about 50 ppm prior to pitching the yeast, then again at the second racking and every other racking after that. The purpose of an initial sulfite treatment is to suppress any micro critters that might be in the must. This gives the yeast that you add a leg up on them and allows it to take over quickly. Honey is antiseptic enough that this kind of initial treatment is unnecessary, so I usually skip it in my meads.

Adjusting the acidity of mead is tricky, and in this experiment I did it mainly by taste. Someone else might have added more or less acid than I did, and that would have affected the taste. Would that have changed the outcome? I don’t know for sure. I kept that possibility in mind, tasted both, and added equal amounts of acid to both batches.

Here is a summery log of the entire experiment:

Date Description
2/26/2006 Boiled: Pitched yeast, SG = 1.105 (1.098 @ 105F)
2/27/2006 No-boil: Pitched yeast, SG = 1.097 (1.094 @ 86F)
3/30/2006 Boiled: SG = 1.000, no-boil: SG = 1.000
4/1/2006 Racked both w/sulfite
5/23/2006 Racked both w/out sulfite
11/14/2006 Racked both w/sulfite, added 1 tsp tartaric acid
2/6/2008 Boiled: SG = 1.000, no-boil: SG = 1.000
2/9/2008 Bottled both w/sulfite, added 0.5 tsp tartaric acid
10/17/2008 Double blind tasting

As you can see, I got a little impatient. This was supposed to be a three year experiment, and that would have put the tasting somewhere in February 2009. I couldn’t wait quite that long, so I moved it up four months to October 2008. At times it seemed like the longest three years of my life – I couldn’t wait to pop corks and start tasting. Now that its over, it seems like those thirty months just flew by. I was surprised, I learned something, and it was definitely worth it!

Small Batches

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1/2 gallon ''backyard burgundy'', 1/2 gallon honey apple, and a 1-pint leon-pinotThere are some good reasons to make wine in 5-gallon (19 liter) or larger batches. Once you know what you’re doing, it takes about the same amount of effort to make five gallons of wine as it does to make one. The amount of headspace in a 5-gallon carboy isn’t much more than in a 1-gallon jug. So five gallons of wine. stored in 1-gallon jugs, is in contact with a lot more air than if it were in a 5-gallon carboy. That makes oxidation a bigger problem. So why am making the three small batches in the photo (and many more that aren’t shown)?

Each one has it’s own story. My “backyard burgundy,” a rose made from Leon Millot, Pinot Noir, Siegerrebe, and Price grapes that I grew in my bonsai vineyard, is on the left. On the right is my honey apple, made from Liberty, Ashmead Kernel, and Roxbury Russets that I grew in my bonsai orchard. Finally, my Leon-Pinot, a red wine made from Pinot Noir and Leon Millot grapes from my bonsai vineyard, is front and center.

I’m still not sure what to call my most recent wine, but Backyard Burgundy just might stick. It’s the product of two less-than-ideal harvests from my bonsai orchard. From pests, large and small, to wacky weather I wasn’t sure what I’d get from these grapes. The 2007 harvest sulked in my freezer until it was joined by the 2008 vintage. Growers all over the Puget Sound complained of low sugar and high acid, so I decided to toss all the grapes into a single batch of rose. So I crushed, pressed, and fermented the juice just like a white wine. All the red grapes gave the wine it’s color, and that’s why it’s a rose instead of a white wine. I love my bonsai vineyard, but volume isn’t it’s strong suit, so the harvest from a difficult year – even two difficult years – will be small. The 8.5 lb gave me about 3 quarts of juice, and I’m hoping for three 750 ml bottles of finished wine.

You’ve really got to want to make wine to make it in these quantities, and I do. That’s why I crushed, fermented, and pressed a red wine from my first harvest ever – 4 lb (about 1.8 kg) of Leon Millot and Pinot Noir grapes. It’s been aging in a 500 ml Grolsch bottle since 2006 and I’m getting ready to open it.

The honey apple came from my biggest harvest of apples. It was big enough that I decided not to supplement the apples with store bought juice, like I usually do, and that will make it my smallest batch of apple wine. How’s that for irony?