Glow-Wine

Got some cool feedback on the old Pumpkin Wine entry from some folks at the University of Minnesota’s Enology program. I had no idea that there was a group out there with the daunting (but tasty!) task of trying to coax a viable wine grape industry out of the frozen Minnesota soil.

All kidding aside, I’d love to see how things go for them… Some of the Michigan wineries have had to overcome the poor weather conditions, and they produce some really good stuff.

Personally, I like the idea of having hundreds of locally brewed wines. It’s just really cool… I ran into that in Switzerland at the Transplant Games a couple of years ago. One of the hospitals cafeterias served wine from grapes grown on the premises…

Anyway, the Minnesotans were wondering about spicing the pumpkin wine. Now this isn’t something I’ve ever done, but it sounds like a really cool idea… A couple years ago I found a spiced Michigan wine called “Witch’s Brew” that was truly excellent. It was a rich red wine, with strong cinnamon and clove flavor, extremely good when served hot. Unfortunately I only bought three bottles of it, and I haven’t found any since.

I did some poking around and found a few recipes for traditional German “Glow-Wine,” which sound interesting. They even suggest using apple wine in some of them, which is another possibility. The thing is, none of them seem to be intended for use with wine that hasn’t been bottled yet.

But I have a cunning plan…

The pumpkin wine is probably ready to be bottled. It’s just a matter of setting aside time to do it, so we’re holding off until after the wedding. But before then we can do some experimenting with one or two of the bottles of pumpkin wine that we’ve got left from my sister’s last batch. When we find a good combination of flavors, we can add those to about a gallon or so of the new wine and let it steep for a couple months before bottling it separately.

I’ll post the result here for those of you who might want to try this at home… Or at your University. Whatever’s convenient.