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.

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...