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 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 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 apple wine, enology, winemaking on Nov 19th, 2007
I racked my apple wine on 11/15/07. It analyzed out as:
Specific Gravity (SG): 0.996, pH: 3.56, Titratable Acidity (TA): 7 g/L
So it had fermented out in less than ten days, but the thing that surprised me was the TA. It rose from 5.5 to 7 g/L when I was expecting it to drop. The wine [...]
Posted in apple wine, herb wine, rhubarb wine, tasting, winemaking on Nov 13th, 2007
Maybe getting caught short, when I racked my mead the other day, was a blessing in disguise. Having half a gallon of mead in a 1-gallon jug, with all that head space threatening to oxidize it, motivated me to rack four other 1-gallon batches. Some of these had been sitting on lees longer than I [...]
Posted in Recipes, apple wine, winemaking on Nov 5th, 2007
Apple wine is great as a dry white. I make it every year from apples, store-bought juice, or a combination. Here’s how I do it:
Posted in apple wine, mead, tasting on Jun 21st, 2007
I bottled four 1-gallon batches, three meads and an apple wine, yesterday.
2005 Apple Wine
I harvested 13 lb of Liberty apples from my backyard, in 2005, and turned them, along with a gallon of Trader Joe’s Gravestein apple juice, into a batch of apple wine. It’s got a rich golden color, a wonderful aroma, and it’s [...]