Washington Winemaker

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.

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Introducing Washington Winemaker’s new Wine Recipe Wizard! This is a more robust version of a spreadsheet I’ve been using to create wine recipes. Use it to go from juice to must by adding sugar, water, and acid. The Wizard is designed to tell you exactly how much of each – all you need to do is tell it about your juice (specific gravity, titratable acidity, and volume) and what you want the must to be like (specific gravity and titratable acidity).

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.

I just bottled this wine made from concentrated frozen Niagara grape juice – yep, wine from Welch’s grape juice. With good winemaking technique, you can turn this humble ingredient into a crisp dry white wine that’s surprisingly good and perfect for summer.

From a starting gravity of about 1.090, it fermented out to 0.992 and I did not sweeten. I know a lot of people will want to sweeten, but I advise against it. Mainly because it’s very good as a dry wine, but also because I’m afraid that sweetening will bring out a “grape juice” flavor. In fact, if you’re making fruit wine and want it taste more of raspberries, strawberries, or whatever you made it from, sweetening will bring some of the that fruit flavor out. That can be a good thing, but not in this case.

It’s acidic, with titratable acidity (TA) of 7 g/L and pH of 3. It may not look like it from the numbers, but this dry acidic wine is easy to drink – even at five months old.

How much does Welch’s wine cost?

From time to time, the concentrate goes on sale for $1/can. When it does I buy 12 cans, add about 6 lb (2.75 kg) of sugar and water to six gallons (23 liters). This gets me at least 5 gallons (19 liters) of finished wine. Here are the details:

Less than $1/bottle! To simplify, I didn’t include the cost of yeast, acid, or nutrient. They would add a tiny bit to the cost. Using cheaper closures (bag in a box, crown caps) would push the cost down.

Every winemaker should make Welch’s wine

Keeping yourself stocked up on Welch’s wine means never having to worry about topping up. Come up a little short on today’s racking? Pop open one of these.

You can also use a wine like this to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth from other wine. Store bought or homemade, they all should pass this simple test. Is it convincingly better than this $1/bottle wine in a blind tasting? If not, then why spend $10 on that Chardonnay or $150 on that high end kit? Don’t get me wrong; some will be better, but now you’ll know which ones.

But it’s a good wine in it’s own right, and that’s the best reason to make it. Crisp but easy to drink, it’s a good simple wine that you’ll want to have on hand.

About the label

When I started making this wine the headlines were pretty dire. This wine went from fermentation to bottle in less than six months and it cost less than 1$/bottle – and that includes 35 cents for the cork. Throw in easy drinking good flavor and you’ve got the perfect wine for hard times. So I decided to call it “Bailout Blanc.”

To label a wine like that, I wanted artwork that conveyed the stress most people are feeling in a lighthearted way. There are lots of way to do that, but Ferrell McCollough’s photo Chris Overworked really stood out. The composition and the post processing come together perfectly, and he was gracious enough to let me use it on my label.

You see a larger photo of the bottle here.

Tags: nad

Jason mentioned this wine favorably on his blog, and I decided to give it a try. I bought it at Trader Joe’s for $6.50. That’s a good price to go along with the good recommendation. Now lets have a look under the cork.

Running the numbers

I’ll start with the usual analysis. Fetzer didn’t have information on the 2006 vintage, and they ignored my e-mail asking for it. They indicated 13.5% alcohol on the bottle and reported this for 2007:

13.49% Alcohol • Titratable Acidity (TA) 6.3 g/L • pH: 3.47 • RS: 0.6g/L (dry)

and here are my measurements of the 2006 vintage:

Specific Gravity (SG): 0.994 • pH: 3.5 • TA: 5 g/L

I like to include these measurements so you and I can compare them with our own homemade wine. If a commercial wine tastes particularly good and well balanced, I want to look at the measurements to see how they did it. The most important measurements, of course, are the ones you do with your nose and your palate. How did the Fetzer measure up?

Going back for more

Jason, I owe you one. This is a nice wine that’s great with pasta or steak on the grill. The Lady of the House and I enjoyed a bottle with dinner of ziti and meatballs. It would also make a terrific Superbowl wine. I don’t rate wines on a 100-point scale, but I can tell you that you get more than you pay for with this wine. I’m going back to buy more.

Tags: nad

I went two seasons without fruit from my Swenson Red grape vine. It was one of the first additions to my bonsai vineyard, and I’ve been struggling with how to prune it. Two years ago, I decided that Swenson Red needs cane pruning to bear fruit.

Canes or spurs?

Canes are just long “branches” of one year old wood with one or two dozen buds along their length. If they had just a few buds, four or so, then they would be a lot shorter and we would call them spurs. I had been spur pruning because it’s easier to take vines in and out of pots, while I trim their roots, without long fragile canes whipping about.

Letting the vine decide

Easier doesn’t get you very far if the varietal doesn’t bear fruit that way, so last year I pruned to canes. I was careful not to jostle them when I tended the vine, re-potted it, or just walked past it. Well it looks like it may have been worth the effort. I’ve noticed a few clusters on my Swenson Red and I’m looking forward to my first crop in three years!

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 off to a great start. It turns out that the acidity of cherry wine is tough to get right, though, and in the end I sweetened it to balance tart tasting wine.

About the label

LouGarou is a talented photographer, and he was kind enough to let me use his photo in my wine label. He’s taken many exceptional shots, but the warm tones in this one made it just the thing for my label – thanks Lou!

I labeled it “Sweet Cherry,” and included alcohol content, TA, pH, and final gravity. Instead of a vintage (not too many people are going to be raving about “Safeway’s 2007 Bing Cherries”) I put a date range. The first date is the day I started and the end date is the day I bottled. You’ll know how long it bulk aged, how long it’s had in the bottle, and yes, when the cherries were grown – that date range says a lot without saying a lot.

How does the cherry wine taste?

I think I managed to balance the wine. The acidity is noticable, but it’s lively and not too tart. Sweetness is there too, but people who “don’t like sweet wine” liked it and didn’t think it was too sweet. I don’t notice the astringency that comes from tannin. This makes it an enjoyable red table wine, but unlike the dry reds that I’m used to. The flavor and aroma are different as well. I wouldn’t say it “tastes like cherries,” but there is something familiar from tasting commercial cherry wine (yes, there is such a thing).

Thoughts on my next cherry wine

This was a learning experience, and I’ve got a to-do list for the next one.

• Use a yeast like Lavlin’s 71-B that consumes malic acid: since most of the acid in cherries is malic and I had trouble with too much acid, having the yeast remove some for me should make things easier.
• Learn more about dealing with high titratable acidity (TA) and high pH at the same time: I’ve been reluctant to use phosphoric acid to adjust the pH because it can be dangerous to handle. Maybe I need to get comfortable with that or find another way to manipulate the different facets of acidity.
• Learn more about cherries:  This is my second batch of cherry wine, and both batches had the high TA – high pH problem. Is it something about the variety of cherry (I used Bing each time)? how it’s grown? or are all cherries like that? I sense another know your ingredients post coming up.

Until then I’ll be enjoying my newly bottled cherry wine – cheers!

Tags: nad

Rhubarb is a high quality ingredient that can make a great, age-worthy wine. It’s also a versatile ingredient that shines in 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.

Sugar and acidity of rhubarb juice

So what does a winemaker need to know about rhubarb? The short answer is sugar and acid. Getting that right is the biggest part of any successful recipe. It turns out that rhubarb has a lot of acid and not much sugar. I juice the rhubarb and normally see measurments like this (these figure are from my most recent batch):

specific gravity (SG): 1.020, titratable acidity (TA): 14 g/L as tartaric, pH: 3.19

This agrees with Ben Rotter’s data:

SG: 1.020, TA: not enough data, pH: 3.17

Most of that acid, 70% or more, is malic.

Juice yield

A lot of people make rhubarb wine by fermenting on the fruit, and most recipes specify the amount of rhubarb by weight. To make sense of these recipes, or make wine with whole fruit, or to compare notes with other wine makers, you’ll need to know how much juice a given weight of rhubarb will yield. I got 515 ml (17.4 fl oz) of juice from 1.115 kg (2.5 lb) of fruit, or a yield of 462 ml/kg (7 fl oz/lb).

I froze the rhubarb, thawed it in a strainer and got 225 ml (7.6 fl oz) of “free run” juice. Then I lightly pressed, just squeezing with my hands, to get another 290 ml (9.8 fl oz). This is low compared to Mr. Rotter’s data (470 – 830 ml/kg). The pulp I discarded was wet, so I could have gotten more with a small press.

You know your own procedures better than I do. Do you efficiently squeeze the fruit leaving bone-dry pulp? Expect over 600 ml/kg (9.2 fl oz/lb). If you press lightly and leave wet pulp, then you’re more likely to get 500 ml/kg (7.7 fl oz/lb), give or take. Now we have some information on yield, sugar, and acidity. What can we do with these data?

The possibilities are endless

I normally make my rhubarb wine dry, and I can tell you it’s terrific that way. I’ve tasted sweet rhubarb wine that was fabulous. I’ve aged rhubarb wine over two years and noticed improvement. I’ve tasted 5+ year old rhubarb wine from the Montana Hutterites that was superb. I’ve heard that the Hutterites successfully age their wine for decades, and Ben Rotter aged a sweet rhubarb wine for 30 years, and it hadn’t past it’s peak. Many wine makers have found rhubarb to be an excellent blending wine.

This is what I mean when I say that rhubarb is versatile. That’s why no recipe can show you “what rhubarb wine tastes like”. To find out, you need to go beyond any one recipe and try different variations. Honey instead of sugar, sweet instead of dry, dry instead of sweet, high acid like a Riesling – and do set some bottles aside for extended ageing! While we’re on the subject of ageing, I wouldn’t recommend rhubarb as an early drinker. Even if you decide against extended ageing, you’ll want to give it at least a year.

Further reading

The Rhubarb Compendium - a good collection of rhubarb information
Improved Winemaking - Ben Rotter’s website – From his fruit data to ideas on wine styles, there’s a lot here for any winemaker

With ten grape vines in pots, and another ten fruit trees, I’ve been doing a lot of hand watering. It’s become quite a chore, so I’ve decided to put in a drip irrigation system. This will have water coming from a garden hose, through a pressure reducing fitting, into a feeder bottle so that I can fertilize, through a half-inch hose, and out of quarter-inch drip lines that run to each pot. Instead of a seemingly endless cycle of fill the watering can – water the vines/trees, I would just be able to turn on the water and go read a book. With a timer, I might not even have to turn the water on and off.

I had an abstract idea of what a drip system was and how it worked. What I needed was some hands on knowledge – what were the various components of a drip system? what did they do? how did they fit together? For a crash course in Drip Irrigation 101, I went to three hardware stores. I struck gold at Lowes with a clerk who had been a plumber and installed many a drip system. Now I have most of the equipment I need and a much better idea of how to put that equipment to use.

Basic equipment for a drip irrigation system

• half-inch tubing – delivers low pressure water to the drip system
• quarter-inch tubing – delivers water to an individual vine or tree
• 25 PSI Pressure Regulator – keeps pressure from overwhelming the system
• 3/4″ hose to 1/2″ tubing adapter – connects the system to a garden hose or tap
• quarter-inch double barbed connectors – connects quarter inch tubing to the half inch tubing
• 50 quarter-inch hole plugs – plugs holes in the half inch tubing

Other equipment that might be needed

• anti siphon device – prevents back flow from the drip system to the water supply
• filter – keeps dirt from clogging the drip system

You can buy this equipment at a garden center as a kit or as separate pieces. I had planned to buy a kit, and use it as a learning tool, but the clerk at Lowes assembled everything I needed for the system I had in mind. If all goes well, I’ll be putting it all together into a working drip irrigation system for use this summer.

Tags: nad