Wine Update

The apricot wine has been bottled. We got an even 30 bottles and a few sips out of the carboy. Based on the small sip we took, our prediction is that it is going to be delicious. We'll know for sure in 6 - 12 months...


With the apricot bottled, we have moved on to two more projects. The first and more complex project is the fruit wine. We started 5 batches in 1-gallon carboys. Each of these should make about 5 bottles.

1) Mixed Berry
2) Strawberry
3) Blueberry
4) Raspberry
5) Raspberry from juice concentrate



We'll be bottling the juice concentrate wine soon because there is essentially no pulp involved. All of the others require at least 3 re-racks because there is a huge amount of sediment involved in using non-pre-musted fruits. The strawberry smells amazing but looks gross. They are all going to be very strong. Doing the measurement, they all dropped well under .99 in a short period of time. We also purchased some fruit-flavor enhancers for before we bottle to ensure the fruit flavor is still there.

The second project is a Chilean Malbec. We are using the large carboy to get about 30 bottles for this one. This particular recipe does not call for many steps. Only 2 reracks and not a large amount of time between them. We are going to be bottling this as soon as we pick up some corks and wash off the used bottles we have.

We'll probably be taking a small break after these batches to get through the summer months. If we can get our hands on some more fresh-picked berries (and Jersey is known for blueberries) we may end up making a few small batches here and there.

To date we have made 58 bottles -- and will be bottling approximately 55 more in the next couple weeks. I don't think I've ever imagined myself owning over 100 bottles of wine...... Going to have to start looking into building a nice winerack in the basement, something custom and cheap -- yet elegant.

We're working on developing a labelling system to be able to keep track of all these bottles. We're thinking of using brown recycled paper bags. Basically sharpy'ing on the date, wine type, batch and bottle number -- and then spraymounting it to the bottle. We don't want anything fancy and we'd like it to be homemade.

Cheers.

Batch #2 - Apricot Country Wine Part 1

With batch #1 - Black Cherry Pinot Noir, successfully bottled, KT and I moved on to our next kit - Apricot Wine. KT did the primary fermentation by herself while home with the baby, and from the look of it, we're having a lot more success. We have applied many of the lessons learned from the first batch and we're having great results.

She put all of the ingredients into the primary fermenter (plastic bucket) and we placed a napkin under the spigot to soak the minor leakage. We left the plastic cover off and covered it with cheesecloth. The initial SG reading was in the ballpark of 1.09. In 5 days it dropped to the target 1.04. At that point I squeezed the pulp to as dry as possible. A method we decided to try this time was to filter-pour.

I put our straining funnel into the secondary and tipped the primary over. The downside to this is obviously the amount of oxygen exposure and the fact that the bottom of the primary will get caught in the funnel, clogging it. Fortunately, the blockage was not significant and I feel we got nearly all the liquid into the secondary.

Once in the secondary, I added water and corked with the airlock. The yeast is still extremely active - to the point where we are wondering if it can over-ferment. The SG is still dropping rapidly, at 1.03 within 24 hours. The next step is to re-rack at 1.0 and add some K-Meta to slow the fermentation. We then rack again in 3 months and, depending on the taste/SG/etc., can bottle if we choose. If we are going to wait 3 months - there may be no sugar left at all! The color is a lovely yellow, similar to pineapple.