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Ghetto wine

This is what I'm currently calling the small gallon batches of wine I make from grocery store bought frozen juice concentrates. I ferment them in plastic gallon milk jugs and that just feels rather ghetto to me. Also (so far) the wine comes out tasting like Boone's which really just adds to the ghetto feel. Maybe I should add brandy so they can be fortified wines?

I racked my ghetto apple-raspberry wine yesterday. It was pretty clear and tasted pretty good. It's probably ready for bottling but I'm going to wait a bit yet. and see if any more yeast/sediment drops out of it. Since it's a white (in appearance) wine I want to be sure it's totally cleared before bottling.

Currently it is sitting in two 1.5 litre wine bottles with ferm locks and one partially full 1 litre bottle with a ferm lock. The stuff that's been in the bottles tastes better to me than the stuff in the partially full bottle. I'm wondering if this is due to the amount of air/oxygen exposure the wine is getting since the bottle is not topped up? It's not that the litre bottle stuff tastes bad, it's just not quite as good. So my quandry is, should I blend all of this wine back together before bottling in order to have a larger quantity of ghetto wine or should I dump (or just separately bottle) the not as good stuff?
As I'm writing this I think the answer is obvious. Mixing them all, and potentially lowering the quality of the whole batch for the sake of what's going to be one bottle (if I'm lucky) of wine is not worth it. I'll keep them separate and maybe add some fruit juice to the not as good stuff in order to top up a 750 ml bottle of it.

I loosely follow this recipe to make this ghetto wine. It's pretty easy to do, the wine tastes good (though not complex by any stretch), and it's done/drinkable relatively quickly.

In other wine news, the extremely sour cherry wine that I stuck in the fridge about a month ago is losing some of it's sourness so either it's just mellowing with age? (in a month, unlikely) or some of the tartaric acid has been precipitating out of the wine in this cold environment. I still don't think this wine is very good tasting, but perhaps with some sweetening prior to bottling could have a good effect.

Anyone got a better name than ghetto wine for this stuff?

Posted by Matt · Nov 10, 11:20 AM
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