Since the house has warmed to a point that is friendly to microbes, I've been on a wine making kick. This weekend I put together a Cherry Rhubarb wine that is currently fermenting. With this years rhubarb plant threatening to take over the yard I figured it was time to use up the rhubarb from last fall that I had in the freezer, this cleared out quite a lot of space. I also had a decent amount of frozen and jarred cherries to use up, not enough for a whole batch of wine on their own but enough to add a touch of flavor. Additionally I had a very small amount of frozen mulberries that we harvested from a tree in the seminary (that has since been cut down :( ) and a few champagne grapes that I don't remember why we had but we did. So here is the break down of what I did:

Ingredients:

• Frozen Rhubarb: 26Lbs 10oz
• Frozen Cherries: 1Lb 14oz
• Jarred Cherries: 1Lb
• Frozen Mullberries: .75Lbs
• Frozen Grapes: .25 Lbs
• Calcium Carbonate: 4 Tbsp
• Sugar: 12 Cups
• Red Star Pasteur Champagne Yeast

Friday evening I placed all of the frozen fruit (and veggies) in the fermenter along with the calcium carbonate and 8 cups of sugar to thaw. The calcium carbonate is a mild base that neutralizes some of the acid in the rhubarb. Rhubarb is very high in acid and this is recommended when making wine from it. The sugar helps to leach the water/juice out as it thaws.

The next afternoon, things had mostly thawed pretty nicely and I gave the stuff a good stir, it was very thick as not a whole lot of liquid had been extracted, though it was still semi frozen. I added enough water to make 6 gallons and the remaining sugar. I stirred further to dissolve the sugar and checked the gravity which was 1.079. This seemed good to me as it would yield a wine with alcohol of around 10-11% if fermented dry, which is quite likely.

At this point I pitched the yeast and covered the fermenter. About a day later it was fermenting vigorously. I'll update with further events as they happen.

Update (6/6/2010): I pressed the wine and ended up with exactly five gallons of wine, funny how that worked out.

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?

This weekend I racked the Zinfandel since primary fermentation was pretty much done with, if not completely done. As must ferments what's happening is that yeast is going crazy eating all the sugar and converting it into alcohol. Eventually either the yeast creates too much alcohol for it to continue to survive or it runs out of sugar and starves. Either way the yeast dies off and settles out to the bottom in a layer of gunk called the lees. Racking is when you siphon the wine off of the lees. Gravity is on our side as dead yeast and other remaining gunk in the wine slowly (over a matter of months) settles to the bottom allowing us to siphon off the good wine on top. This process is known as racking. You generally want to rack your wine a number of times (with a number of weeks or even months between rackings) to eliminate as much dead yeast as possible which gives you a better tasting wine.

One thing that was kinda interesting during racking was in the measurements: the sugar % reading and the brix (which are really just different scale readings on the hydrometer) both came out negative. What does that mean? Other than the specific gravity is pretty low, I'm not totally sure really.

Racking measurements (8/31/08):

• Wine: 5 gallons
• Brix: ~ -1.5
• % Sugar: ~ -3.0

So to get the alcohol % you are supposed to subtract the initial sugar % measurement with the measurement after fermentation. So 12 minus -3 equals 15. So the wine should be about 15% alcohol or so. So if I hadn't added that extra sugar to the must at the start to raise the sugar % from 10 to 12 would I have a 13% alcohol wine instead? I'm starting to question the accuracy of my hydrometer, or maybe I should measure by the specific gravity scale and calculate from there? Regardless it was a change of 15% points on the scale so it should be about 15% alcohol which is all I'm trying to measure with the hydrometer anyway, right?

Other things of note:

This wine is my first 'large' (large being relative) batch, and I noticed it was much easier to accept that some wine at the bottom was just unrecoverable from the lees. The fact that I had already filled a 5 gallon jug with wine made it easier to let go, compared to the liter bottles I've been filling so far.

This wine tastes much better than the previous two, which I also racked. The cherry wine is still very sour and I may have to augment it by adding back some sugar to make it drinkable. The milk jug wine is decent/drinkable but nothing spectacular.

Can dead yeast and lees be used as a fertilizer? We will soon find out as I dumped them in the back of the yard/garden/over grown area.

The grapes on the vines in the back are starting to turn purple, but they're not very large at all and there aren't very many of them. I'm guessing I'd be lucky to get 6 ounces of juice total from the whole vine.

The week before last Anne's coworker, Chad, gave her a huge bag of cherries from the tree in his backyard. We figured we had two options, either make about 5000 cherry scones or mash it up and try to make wine out of them. Last weekend we mashed up the cherries and deposited them into a makeshift fermentation vessel. Initially the cherry juice by itself was about 5% sugar so I added some extra. Then I dumped in some yeast and stuck a fermentation lock on the top.

Initial measurements (7/26/08):

• Must: 2 litres
• Brix: 23.5
• % Sugar: 12.0

Upon checking it this morning it looks like the primary fermentation has completed. I now need to improvise some way of pressing the wine to separate it from the cherry fruit, seeds, and skins. Cheese cloth will probably work...

Now that it seems I'm doing this in earnest, I need a name of my winery, got any suggestions?

Update: On saturday, Anne and I pressed the wine through a colander lined with cheese cloth. It was a rather messy business and I have to thank Anne for doing most of the really dirty work. We poured the pressed wine into a new container and stuck a ferm lock on top though it's pretty much done fermenting based on the measurements I took:

Press measurements (8/02/08):

• Wine: 1+ litres
• Brix: 1.0
• % Sugar: 0.0