Anne and I have been busy with the yard lately. We've been moving some plants and adding a few here and there and also trying to grow some food plants. We moved a lot of the peonies and tulips last fall and they seem to be doing well in their new location. A few tulips we missed and moved early this spring, they didn't like that so much, we'll see if they come back next year I guess.

We got a ton of hostas from a lady selling them on craigslist and planted those along the fence in between a lot of the tulips that we moved last fall, then we put down mulch around them, it looks pretty nice!

We also went to home depot and got some yews to plant in the front of the house. That area was looking pretty bad, part of it was sort of being overrun by irises, but none of them were flowering, probably because they're almost always in shade. We dug up and moved some of the larger irises and just kind of turned the rest into the soil and planted our yews and then mulched the area. It looks a million times better.

Next to the rain barrel you can see one of my vines. Speaking of, my vines are doing really well, lots of new shoots and leaves. They also all have produced a number of clusters. However, since they are young and in their new home this year, I want them to concentrate on growing strong roots and good cordons, so I removed the clusters from all of my vines. I did leave one, I just couldn't bring myself to remove them all, I want to taste my grapes!

Earlier this week my Marquette grape vines arrived on our doorstep. I'm currently soaking their roots and will be planting them tonight. That's exciting! What's not exciting is that I won't really have a decent crop of grapes for another few years.

Wine making is a great way to teach patience.

for growing!

Even though we're in Wisconsin doesn't mean we can't grow good wine grapes. There are quite a number of hybrid grapes that are very cold hardy and also produce a good wine. In addition to cold hardiness, many of these hybrids are resistant to various diseases that plague traditional Eurpoean vinifera vines.

The University of Minnesota has developed a few hybrids that I'm currently investigating, particularly Marquette grapes. They're very cold hardy (down to -35°F) and also very disease resistant. They create a good red wine that some have compared to shiraz, and others merlot, thought Pinot Noir is Marquette's grandfather. The acidity is a bit high but that can be corrected for in the winery either through blending, cold stabilization, or other methods. It also yields a fairly high sugar content, around 25 brix.

Another grape I'm investigating is the Sabrevois. This variety was bred by Elmer Swenson in Northern Wisconsin (he also did a lot of work along with the University of Minnesota). Sabrevois is also hardy down to -35°F very disease resistant and makes a complex red wine. Similar to Marquette it gives slightly high acids and its recommended to combine with a grape with higher sugars (Marquette perhaps?). It is also recommended to to a semi-carbonic maceration to ferment these grapes or at least pressing early to avoid an off flavor that often results from a full maceration.

Those two I have done the most investigation of, they're appealing to me because of their extreme cold hardiness, strong resistance to disease and the good wine they produce. Some other varieties I'm interested in but haven't investigated as much are: Marechal Foch, Noiret™, St. Croix, and Cabernet Severny. Cabernet Severny is an interesting one to me since it's not a hybrid with american grapes but was actually developed for growing in Russia. It's been hybred with a hardy Mongolian grape vine as well as some french varieties and of course Severny. Not sure how that all works out as there's not a lot of information about it online; not even sure if I'll be able to find anyone selling it.

Last night I pressed the second wine I'm making with the concord grapes. The SG was getting down below what the recipe I'm following recommended for removing the skins. I had been hesitating because I had no spare carboys to deposit the wine into. I had called a few people selling them on Craigslist but nothing panned out. But it was past time to press and I didn't want to risk compromising the wine any further.

Luckily, I had picked up a beer brewing kit this weekend. While it didn't come with any carboys, it did come with two 6 gallon plastic buckets and a sealed lid with a ferm lock for one of them. I pressed pretty much the same way I did with the first fermentation using the large wire strainer. The only difference was this time I squeezed the skins with my hands to extract as much wine as I could.

I got a lot.

I literally filled the bucket to the rim with wine. I had to take two liters back out to put the top on. I now have something like eleven gallons of concord wine undergoing secondary fermentation. This is in addition to the five gallons of zinfandel that is clearing in the basement. That's a lot of wine!

I also decided to attempt a cold stabilization of the cherry wine to take out some of the acid and hopefully reduce it's sourness. I put it in our fridge, which I don't know if it's cold enough but it's worth a shot. In cold stabilization excess tartaric acid will crystallize and precipitate out of the wine. You then rack the wine off the crystals and you've reduced the acidity. We'll see what happens, the cherry wine may just be destined to become and ingredient in sangria but I have higher hopes for it.

This weekend was busy! Anne and I took Friday off of work because AT&T was coming to install our new internet (and TV, which we'll be canceling when our free preview is up) We also wanted to get some stuff done around the house.

First order of business, on Friday morning the Specific Gravity of the concord must had fallen below 1.030, and you know what that means! Well probably you don't. But for the recipe I'm following it means it's time to remove the juice from the grape skins and pulp. This is what's generally known as pressing, however I didn't actually use a press. One, because I don't have one; and two, because I'm reusing the pulp I wouldn't technically be losing any wine by not pressing it out.

I scooped it out with a strainer.

Once I had removed all of the floating pulp and skins I attempted to rack the remaining liquid must into a 5 gallon carboy. This did not work well because the siphon kept on getting clogged by remaining pulp and gunk on the bottom. I ended up using a large cup to scoop the liquid out and pour it through the strainer and into a funnel into the carboy. When the strainer got too coated with gunk it was deposited in with the rest of the skins and pulp. The gunk got thicker as I got towards the bottom of the barrel, and there were tons of seeds as well. This all went back into the primary fermenter for the second batch. Soon the carboy was full to over flowing. I removed some of it to make room for the bung and for any small foam ups and put that into a small container to use for topping off when I rack this wine. It was bubbling away merrily the moment I put the fermentation lock on it.

Apparently, and I'm not too surprised about this, there is enough flavor in concord grape skins and pulp to ferment two batches of wine from them. Actually as I read a bit more this is not an uncommon practice (with any grape skins/pulp) for making table wines.

Friday night I put together the second batch of concord wine. I'm going to need to name these two differently somehow so as to distinguish them once they are bottled. For this second batch, I added to the existing gunk, a bunch of water, four cans of concord grape juice concentrate (from the grocery store), a bit of grape tannin, some acid blend powder, and ten pounds of sugar. Stirred it all up and let it go. No yeast this time, the pulp from the previous fermentation already had plenty. I'll let this batch ferment until the Specific Gravity reaches 1.010 and then I'll press again (and for real this time) and put this second batch into a carboy as well. Of course before that happens I'll have to get another carboy...

Those grapes I picked were indeed Concords as I suspected. I got about 36 pounds or so, which turned out to be plenty for concord wine as you want to dilute it down with a lot of water because they are very acidic.

On Saturday night we cleaned and destemmed them all and Anne volunteered to give them the stomping of their lives. We learned that the machines that crush and destem for you are probably worth the money; destemming sucks and stomping isn't a whole lot of fun either.

Following the first recipe listed here (times 6), in addition to the crushed grapes I also added two and a half gallons of water and about ten pounds of sugar to the fermenter. Wow, that's a lot!

I do plan on doing the second wine recipe as well, where you take out the mashed grape guts about 5-7 days into the first fermentation, squeeze as much juice from them as possible, dump them into another fermenter and add more water and sugar and ferment again. Very soon we're going to be having a lot of wine in process around here.

The thing about concord wines is they have to age for a long time before they get good. This recipe says at least 3 years, so I guess in 2011-12 we'll see if this wine turned out well. (Maybe I should do the same thing with the cherry wine?)

Yesterday, Anne saw a craiglist ad for free grapes in someone's backyard in Menomonee Falls. So I called them and went out there to harvest some grapes in the hopes that I'll be able to make some wine from them. They had a huge arched arbor that was covered in vines and loaded with grapes. I think I got pretty close to 50 pounds of grapes. There were still plenty of grapes on the vine when I left but they were difficult to access and hard to see since it had gotten dark.

I'm not totally sure what kind of grapes they are, probably Concord. They're very sweet and a few of them were literally bursting out of their skins. I'm hoping they'll make some good wine. I guess we'll find out.

So now, in addition to the millions of other things going on this weekend we'll also be crushing and destemming these grapes and getting them ready for fermentation.

In other winery related news, I believe the milk jug wine is about ready to be bottled. Though there will probably only be one bottle of it. The cherry wine is still very sour, I'm gonna try adding an antacid to see if I can cut down on that. Worst case scenario it gets turned into sangria. I racked the zin again last weekend, it's tasting even better and I'm excited to be bottling it maybe in a month or so.

I also made a couple of potential labels for my bottles:

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.

Encouraged by the improving flavors of the Milk Jug wine and the improvised cherry wine, this weekend I finally got around to putting together the large batch of Zinfandel that I had bought a number of weeks ago. I pretty much followed the directions on the cans of concentrate and then added 4 extra cups of sugar when the sugar % measurements came out a little lower than I wanted (ha ha, as if I actually know what I want).

Here are the ingredients I dumped into the fermenter:

• 2 cans of Zinfandel Grape Concentrate (Alexander's brand)
• ~11.5 cans of cold water
• 12 cups of sugar (recipe called for 8)
• 3 tsp yeast nutrient powder
• 2 tsp acid blend powder
• 1 pkg Premium Cuvée yeast

I decided to forgo adding any tannin or doing anything else too far out for this first big batch. I want to get something good and drinkable to start and then I'll start experimenting and producing stuff that sucks.

Initial measurements 8/16/08:

• Must: ~5 gallons
• Brix: 23.0
• % Sugar: 12

I think I have decided to go with my wonderful mother-in-law's idea and call the winery Mute Dog Winery. I suppose I need to get going on designing a logo and some labels for it now.

Last weekend I picked up a used wine making kit from an ad on craigslist. I've been interested in home brewing for some time, last Christmas I got a book on making wine as a gift and a few weeks ago we went to a part at a friends and he served up his home brewed beer that was quite tasty. So being utterly provoked and having let the opportunity of a used wine kit slip through my fingers a few months ago (these are fairly rare on craigslist), I jumped on this one and brought it home. I also stopped at The Purple Foot home brewing supply store and got some additional supplies and ingredients.

The Purple Foot, however, does not sell wine grapes, and, in fact, wine grapes aren't especially easy to come by in Milwaukee, who knew? There is a winery in Pewaukee, but their website doesn't mention anything about their vineyards, so I have a feeling they buy their grapes from elsewhere. Similarly, Cedar Creek Winery in Cedarburg also do not grow their own grapes (as far as I know). They are partnered with Wollersheim Winery in Prairie du Sac, who do have a vineyard but even so they also buy grapes for some of their wines. In addition to their scarcity, or more likely because of it, wine grapes aren't cheap either. What's a home winemaker to do?

Well, if you're crazy, and I am, you could try growing your own. It just so happens that there is a grape vine growing in my back yard. I didn't plant it, I have no idea what kind of grapes it will produce, nor do I know if they will any good for making wine. If you think this seems like a stupid thing to rely on to make wine from, you'd be right.

Luckily for idiots like me you don't even need grapes to make wine anymore. And I don't mean that in the 'you can make wine from strawberries' sense of the word (even though you can). What I'm talking about is wine grape concentrates. Some crazy genius figured a way to remove most of the sugar and the water from wine grape juice. Then he packaged it up and shipped it all over the place to be sold to dorks like me. All I have to do is reconstitute the concentrate with water, add sugar to my desired level of sweetness and away I go. From two 46oz cans of concentrate you can make yourself 5 gallons of wine. Additionally, you don't have to go through the effort (and cost) of getting a crusher/de-stemmer for your grapes and pressing your must (if you're making red).

So I got a couple of cans of Zinfandel. It seems wrong to even write something like that, but that's what I did.

Now, because I'm a freak, or because I'm scared to attempt this with pretty much no experience and I don't want to run the risk of making garbage wine. Instead of diving in and putting all this stuff together right away, I have delayed the making of my Zinfandel for the moment. I am sort of following these instructions and making a small batch of wine in a repurposed milk jug out of raspberry-apple juice concentrate, some water, and a bunch of sugar. I figure if I can create something semi-decent out of this, then I will start my Zinfandel.

This is all stupid, of course, what will I do if my milk jug wine turns out crappy? Give up? No, I'll go ahead anyway, but maybe I'll have learned something? hopefully? please?

Anyway, hoping that I will be able to make decent table wines, I have created a section on the site called Home Brew, where I'll be posting my recipes and notes as I move forward with this hobby. Maybe we can all learn something, hopefully it won't simply be that I suck at making wine.