Growing grapes and making wine in Bellevue
Posted in apple wine, other blogs on Aug 31st, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in cherry wine on May 25th, 2009
Two years ago I set out to make wine from cherries the way you would make red wine from grapes. I bought 43 lb (19.5 kg) of Bing Cherries from Safeway, put them in a large picnic cooler, and crushed them the old fashioned way. Adjusting the sugar was a little tedious, but I was [...]
Posted in ingredients, rhubarb wine on May 18th, 2009
Rhubarb is a high quality ingredient that can make a great, age-worthy wine. It’s also a versatile ingredient that takes to many different styles. To take advantage of its versatility, you need to know what it brings to your wine and what you need to add.
Posted in apple wine, mead on Oct 1st, 2008
I’ll often make a fruit mead the way you would make a second wine. I made a cherry mead like that last year, for example, and I’ll make an apple mead the same way. I saved the pulp from apples I juiced to make wine, put it in a ziplock bag, and froze it. That’s [...]
Posted in apple wine on Sep 29th, 2008
Normally I use my own apples to supplement store bought juice in my apple wine, but this year I had more fruit available so I decided to make it exclusively from my own apples. I followed the same procedure as last year.
Ingredients
12.8 lb (5.8 kg) of roxbury russet, ashmead kernel, and liberty apples
0.25 tsp tannin
0.5 [...]
Posted in cherry wine, commercial wine on Jul 14th, 2008
I’m still trying to get the hang of cherry wine, but while I tinker and tweak I might be able to buy some from the Ten Spoon Vineyard. This Montana winery uses Lambert cherries from Flathead Lake to make a dry red wine. I always get excited when I find the pros making “fruit [...]
Posted in gardening, rhubarb wine on May 29th, 2008
This time last year, I was trying to make up for lost time, “better late than never!” I thought as I belatedly weeded, watered, and fertilized. I didn’t want spindly plants this year, so I tended my rhubarb in March. The payoff came in May when I harvested 1 lb 14.5 oz (865 g), putting [...]
Posted in apple wine, mead, measurement & testing, tomato wine on Feb 28th, 2008
Cherry Mead: The case of the disappearing acid
Suppose you measure 6 g/L titratable acidity (TA), then add about 1.3 g/L of tartaric acid. After you let it sit for a while you’d expect a TA over 7, right? Me too. You certainly wouldn’t expect just a little over 5 (call it 5.2), would you? I [...]
Posted in peapod burgundy on Feb 20th, 2008
This blog is about making wine, so I don’t talk about my vegetable garden very much. My gardening and winemaking overlap in some ways like rhubarb wine, oregano wine, tomato wine, and the one-pint (500 ml) batch of wine from my own grapes. Well there’s going to be some more overlap this year, because I’m [...]
Posted in rhubarb wine on Feb 13th, 2008
I make rhubarb wine every year. I get about 6 fl oz/lb (400 ml/kg) of juice when I thaw frozen rhubarb, and since I use about 3 lb/gal (360 g/L) of rhubarb I need to add a lot of water. But 6 fl oz/lb scales up to over 4.5 gallons from 100 lb of “fruit.” [...]