I’ll never forget my first mistake

I don’t know how he’d feel about me relaying his story of how he lost 5 gallons of promising wine, but fortunately (?) I’ve made plenty of my own mistakes. My very first wine got off to an exciting start, and I checked in on it hourly. I worried and doted over every step. Did I add just the right amount of tannin? The right kind? How about acid? Should I have used a different yeast? It’s been hours since I pitched the yeast – how come it’s not fermenting yet?!?! I needn’t have worried about any of that and not just because it was destined to come crashing down – literally – and spread out over the floor as it flowed over and around the shards of broken glass.

I was laser-focused on some important details

Nope. None of the those things mattered one bit. And I now know they wouldn’t have mattered even if I had been paying attention to my entire setup during the First Racking. It wasn’t just the first time that particular wine would be racked (siphoned from one container into another) it was the first time I had ever siphoned anything. So it was a big deal and I was determined to Do It Right. That meant no splashing. The whole point of siphoning is to transfer the wine without incorporating oxygen into it, so I was very intent on the end of the siphon hose – getting it into the receiving vessel quickly and smoothly, getting (and keeping) it submerged as quickly as possible, and keeping the vessel stable to it didn’t agitate the wine. I wasn’t wrong about any of that, and I did them all pretty well. I just left out a thing or two that proved to be important.

But overlooked one or two others

Like making sure the siphon hose was long enough for the height of my counter and the size of the 1-gallon jugs I was using. And keeping in mind that tugging on the (slightly too short) hose to get it and keep it submerged didn’t just reduce splashing but also pulled on the jug of fermenting wine sitting on the edge of the counter just above me. And that just because it didn’t fall right away didn’t mean that, as the racking progressed, the constant tug of the siphon hose wouldn’t overcome the (steadily falling) weight of fermenting wine holding the jug in place.

Everyone makes mistakes

It would have been helpful to learn all of those things a litter earlier than I did – yeah, that would have been great. Instead the 1-gallon jug with about half a gallon of fermenting wine came down with a … well I don’t remember exactly what it sounded like. I just remember being snapped out of whatever I was thinking about, which was probably how great the siphoning was going (no splashing here!), to find myself barefoot, wearing shorts, and sitting cross legged on my kitchen floor surrounded by shards of glass (from really big to really small and everything in between) and about half a gallon of fermenting wine spreading out over the floor.

The trick is to learn the right lessons

That was, um, discouraging. But I survived (I don’t know how, but literally without a scratch) to make wine another day. The remarkable thing is that I’m still learning from that all these years later. Yes, I make sure about the length of my siphon hose and that jugs and carboys are secure as I siphon from them. But today I realized the most important lesson is to develop an efficient and reliable procedure for each step in your wine making. Things like racking, bottling, testing, making up a must should all have a tried and true checklist – literally a written list of every item you will need and every step you will take. No more discovering at the last minute that the racking cane’s foot didn’t get sanitized or that you don’t have enough containers of the right size for all the wine your’re going to rack, or … anything. Each of these processes are simple enough that we ought to be able to do them the same way each time. No surprises, no mistakes, so the excitement in homemade wine can come from how it tastes.

This is how I make rhubarb wine, apple wine, raspberry wine, cherry wine, and others. Juice, measure, adjust, then ferment. The Wizard helps with the “adjust” step.

Give it a try – Give me some feedback

I’m not sure there’s a first version of anything that’s perfect, and I don’t expect this to be an exception. There are ways to make it better, and I don’t know all of them. So if you think of one, let me know. I wanted to get it out quickly – for Rachel, Paul, and everyone else who’s been waiting for me to do this – and that meant leaving some unfinished business:

Known Issues

• You have to enter the volume in liters, and this probably isn’t ideal for US users. I plan to add a radio button that allows you to select US or metric units, but in the meantime remember that 1 gallon = 3.785 liters.
• You can only use sugar syrup with a specific gravity of 1.310. Another radio button will be coming soon that will allow honey or custom values.
• The Wizard doesn’t handle juices that are sweeter and more acidic than the must. So if your juice SG is higher than the must SG and your juice TA is higher than your must TA, you will get an error message.
• There are some limits on what values you can enter, but it will still allow you to specify a must that is impossible to create with a standard sugar syrup. In cases like that the Wizard will tell you to add negative volumes of stuff – you won’t run into this for real world juices and ordinary musts, but it’s a bug that is in there and I do plan to fix it.

I’m excited about this, I’ll keep working on it, and I hope it helps.

How much sugar?

I intend to raise the SG by 0.010 to 1.006, and that will mean adding about 30 g/L of sugar. For each US gallon, then, I’ll be adding 113.55 g (about 4 oz). How did I decide on 0.010? Well I didn’t want the most memorable thing about my wine to be that its sweet, so I aimed for a small incremental change. I thought that 0.010 would give me an incremental boost that wouldn’t overdo it, and anything less might have gone unnoticed. It’s important to set clear goals in your wine making, but sometimes “not too little but not too much” is as precise as you can get.

Make a sanitized sugar syrup

Unlike honey, sugar can harbor unwanted micro critters, so I’ll want to sanitize it before adding it to the wine. It’s also good practice to dissolve any solid additives in water, or other liquid (maybe a small about of the wine) before adding them to wine. That way the additive (sugar in this case) is incorporated into the wine without disturbing it and releasing a lot of dissolved CO2 all at once. So for each US gallon, I’ll measure out about 2 fl oz (about 30 ml) of water, boil it in a microwave, dissolve the 4 oz (about 114 g) sugar, bring back to a boil in the microwave, then cool in a water bath. I’m trying to minimize the amount of water I use, but if the sugar doesn’t dissolve easily I’ll add a little more.

Update 2/9/2009 – Sugar Syrup: Rethinking the proportions

After making sugar syrups and reading more about it, I’ve settled on two parts sugar to one part water (by volume) as the best way to make it. I’ve collected what I know about sugar, and making sugar syrup into a separate post. It’s one to bookmark and refer back to.

Stabilize and rack the wine onto the sugar syrup

Once the sugar-water has cooled, it’s time to add the sulfite and sorbate. This will stabilize the wine and keep any dormant yeast from springing into action. Check the directions on the package of sorbate that you buy, mine call for 0.5 tsp/1 US Gallon so I’ll add that along with sulfite to 50 ppm. Pour this sanitized sugar syrup with sulfite and sorbate into a sanitized container then rack the wine into it. It’s really a good idea to rack at this point because you’ll be leaving behind any sediment, which is always a good thing but it’s especially important now to leave behind as much yeast as possible, and the siphoning will gently mix the syrup into the wine.

Now comes the most common task in winemaking – waiting. Give the sugar time, a week at least – a month if you can, to integrate into the wine, and check to make sure it hasn’t started fermenting again. After that comes the most fun task in winemaking – taste it. If it’s still not sweet enough, then go through another sweeten-wait-taste cycle. If it’s ready, then it’s bottling time. I’ll drink to that!

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?

Its tax day in the US, and this year taxes made me busier and grumpier than normal. With all that behind me, I’m starting to feel like my old self. So when Welch’s concentrated grape juice went on sale the other day, I bought twelve cans to make a “Tax Day Wine.” Yep, definitely feeling better! If you’ve never made wine from frozen concentrate, it probably seems like a nutty idea. There is method in this madness, however, and good technique can transform Welch’s grape juice into a drinkable wine that costs less than $1/bottle. Think of it as the home wine maker’s version of “Two Buck Chuck,” the simple, popular table wine that Trader Joe’s sells for $2/bottle in most of the country (and a higher but still affordable $3/bottle here in Washington).

What kind of juice

There are all sorts of frozen concentrates available, and I’ve made wine from a lot of them. The white grape juice, made from Niagra grapes, is the most consistent, and that’s what I’ll be using. Others have been hit or miss, with some of the hits being really good and some of the misses being really disappointing. I suggest you start with white grape (other brands, like Old Orchard, are fine). After you make that, you’ll have a better idea of what to expect from concentrates. If you want to make more, then by all means try the blends like Dole’s Pine-Orange-Banana – just watch your acid, don’t expect the wine to taste like the juice, and have fun.

I hope to make this in the next week or so, and then I’ll do a proper writeup. Until then, Happy Tax Day!

Update 1/29/09: Better late than never! Full writeup on Welch’s wine

Boy did I ever get sidetracked! It was nine months in coming, but I finally posted a complete recipe for wine from frozen concentrate. If you’ve made Welch’s wine, let me know how it turned out. If not, maybe now’s the time to give it a try. While you’re at it, you might have a look at my Produce Department Chablis, a wine made from grocery store grapes.

Time to experiment!

A couple of weeks ago, I passed along some great advice about pairing wine and chocolate for Valentine’s Day. That got me thinking about making a wine for the Day of Romance. What should the wine be like? At first, I thought it should pair with chocolate, like those earlier recommendations. Then I thought, I’ll make it with chocolate! I’ve heard of chocolate being used in making wine and mead (even beer), and I’ve always been curious about it.

It’ll take some doing, but it’ll be fun

This is the first in a series of articles on making wine with chocolate. I have a lot of questions, like should I try to make a plain chocolate wine the way I made Oregano Wine? Should I use a more traditional base that goes with chocolate, like raspberry or cherry, and incorporate chocolate into the wine? What form of chocolate should I use (solid, cocoa, syrup, extract)? As I find answers, and more questions, I’ll update this series with new articles. Ultimately, and hopefully in time for next Valentine’s Day, I’ll fashion a recipe and make chocolate wine!

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Mead’s peculiar chemistry makes it difficult to measure the titratable acidity (TA). I explain this in more detail here, but the short version is that the common tests, like titration, overstate the TA. That made me think that such tests had no value, but I’ve since changed my mind. Measured TA’s don’t give you a precise value, but they do give you some information. That’s why I reported TA values for all five meads yesterday.

Using titratable acidity values in making mead

What do those values tell us? I began to get an idea about that when I was thinking about my cherry mead. As I said back then, you can use the TA values as upper limits. If you want to make a mead with the acid profile of a white wine, for example, you look up the range of acid values common in white wine then aim for the high end of the range. A good book on winemaking basics will give you that information. I like Daniel Pambianchi’s Techniques in Home Winemaking, he covers the basics really well and has special sections on ice wine, port, and sparkling wine. He says that the TA in white wines will normally range from 5 – 7.5 g/L. Adjusting a mead to 7.5 g/L puts the actual TA somewhere below that. Tasting the adjusted mead, after about a month or so to allow any acid additions to integrate with the mead, will reveal if the acidity is too low. If it is, then a series of add (no more than 0.5 g/L) – wait – taste cycles will nudge it right into the sweet spot.

Trying to improve a good approach

This is a good approach, but I’d like to get better information on the lower limit of a mead’s TA. Since the measurement error stems from the gluconolactone that exists in equilibrium with gluconic acid and that equilibrium depends on temperature and pH, maybe careful measurement of TA, pH, and temperature would yield some information on how much gluconolactone got caught up in the measurement. We might be able to use that to get a lower limit on, or even pin down, the actual TA. I don’t know how to do that yet, but I’ll see if I can find out. Another way to tackle this problem is to find out how much gluconolactone typically exists in honey. Putting limits on gluconolactone concentration will allow us to put limits on the actual TA. Those are my ideas anyway, if anyone can shed some light on them, or has another idea, please leave a comment and let us all know.

Ready or not, this four year old mead is going in a bottle

I tasted sweetness on the 2004 plain mead, despite the low SG. It had that distinctive, pleasant aroma that I’ve come to associate with mead, and the lady of the house thought it was, “a little young, but it’s going to be good.” I’m not sure I’m as patient as she is, so I’m going to bottle it.

This apple mead is the only one not ready to bottle

The 2005 apple mead tasted and smelled of apple, but only a hint. I thought it was a little tart. It was the only one of the lot that I thought wasn’t clear enough to bottle.

Trying to settle a long running debate

The 2006 experiment is a test of the idea that boiling a mead’s honey-water mixture before pitching the yeast impairs the aroma by driving off volatile compounds. I split a batch, boiled one and made the other without heating. That was two years ago, and I think these meads are ready to bottle. I normally age mead for three years though, so I may let them age in the bottle then have a tasting party next February.

Update 10/28/2008 – The results are in!
It was a long running experiment with a little surprise at the end. Follow this link to see the results of my mead boiling test.

The trouble with titration

The 2006 grape mead is made from the pomace of my smallest batch of wine ever. I added honey, water, nutrient, and cream of tartar. I had some trouble checking the TA on this one because I ran short of sodium hydroxide, the base I use to titrate acid in a wine sample. I added 5 ml to the sample, and that brought the pH to 7.4. That’s very close to the end point. If I really had reached the end point, it would have indicated a TA of 5 g/L. It’s a bit more, maybe 5.25 g/L, but since I can’t be sure I just noted “5+”

Hmm, that acid measuring contraption I wrote about the other day just looks better and better.

I learned of a different way to test for titratable acidity, the other day. At the last meeting of the Puget Sound Amatuer Wine and Beer Makers club, Don Proctor demonstrated this method using an odd looking device. He used ordinary baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to neutralize the acid in a test sample. The important thing about this chemical reaction is that it gives off carbon dioxide (CO2) in direct proportion to the amount of acid neutralized. Now his device didn’t look so odd. The stoppers, tubing, glass cylinders, and green liquid were used to measure the amount of CO2, and if you know how much wine was in your sample and how much CO2 was produced, you can find the acidity of your sample.

The difference is in what you measure

This method, and conventional titration, both aim to measure the amount of acid by neutralizing it with a base. In a titration, you add a carefully measured amount of base until all the acid is neutralized. It’s important that you add just enough base to neutralize all the acid – no more and no less – because you determine the amount of acid in the sample from the amount of base that you add. Because you have to measure the base so precisely, it’s best to add it in liquid form. That means you need to have a solution of base at a precise concentration. Now, this is easy to find, but it’s expensive and it has a short shelf life.

Why the new way is better

You need to neutralize all the acid in Mr Proctor’s method too, but you don’t need to know how much base it took to do that. That means you don’t need to determine the end point (no pH meter) and you can use cheap, shelf stable baking soda instead of expensive perishable sodium hydroxide. That’s a big plus, as I found out the last time I ran out of chemicals. I’m going to have to get one of these contraptions!

Update 9/8/2008: A picture is worth a thousand words

If you’re having trouble visualizing it, take a look at this photo.