Growing grapes and making wine in Bellevue
Posted in commercial wine on Apr 13th, 2009
I had high hopes for this wine ($9 at Costco), because the Kirkland brand is usually pretty good and I liked the Kirkland Sauvignon Blanc. So how did it stack up? Running the numbers When I make wine at home, I measure the specific gravity, titratable acidity, and pH. I thought I’d start doing that [...]
Posted in mead on Mar 23rd, 2009
It’s been nearly two years since I started this batch. I added acid and oak chips to my simple mead recipe in making this still, dry, lightly oaked mead. It fermented out to a specific gravity (SG) of 0.996, and I didn’t sweeten. Since the original gravity was about 1.082, I’m calling it 11% alcohol [...]
Posted in commercial wine on Mar 2nd, 2009
A lot of cheap wine is overpriced, so it’s a real treat to find a $4 bottle that I want to buy more of. A friend recommended Panilonco 2008 Reserve Chardonnay/Voignier and I bought a bottle at Trader Joe’s – a great place to hunt for bargains. I like my white wines to have a little [...]
Posted in Recipes, welch's wine on Jan 19th, 2009
Can you really make wine from Welch’s grape juice? Welch’s, or most any brand, of white grape juice is made from Niagra grapes. These aren’t considered wine grapes, and there’s a good reason for that. Still, with proper wine making technique, you can make a crisp dry white from concentrated frozen grape juice that is [...]
Posted in winemaking on Nov 10th, 2008
There 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 [...]
Six of us gathered for a great evening that began with a tasting. Not just any tasting, it concluded a three year experiment that tested the effect of boiling on making mead. Two meads went head to head that night. I made one with a ten minute boil, and the other was as identical as [...]
Posted in DIY equipment on Oct 15th, 2008
Maybe you’re trying to add just the right amount of sugar to your must, or measure out crystallized honey for mead. If you make wine or mead long enough, you’ll want to measure large quantities of liquid. I have a 2-cup (500 ml) measuring cup, but that didn’t cut it when I needed to measure [...]
Posted in tasting on Oct 8th, 2008
Greg Mankiw teaches economics at Harvard University, and I read his blog regularly. He recently spotlighted part of a Boston Globe Article on the lighter side of science. He zeroed in on the work of another economist – ok, I know what you’re thinking, “as exciting as one economist talking about another sounds, what the [...]
Posted in apple wine on Sep 29th, 2008
Making apple wine from your own apples! Equipment and ingredients you will need, measurements you will need to make – and how to do it.
Posted in commercial wine, tasting on Sep 15th, 2008
For those of you who don’t know, Costco is a chain of warehouse stores, mainly in the US and Canada, that allows you to buy in bulk from a limited selection at terrific prices. It can be a good place to buy wine, but I hadn’t seen them sell it under there own label – [...]