Tag Archives: Wine

So, the big plum wine plan didn’t quite work out the way we hoped today. Biggest problem was the lack of plums…

I guess it was a rough year for the folks at Wasem Fruit Farm. An early thaw followed by frost didn’t do great things for either the apple or the plum crops. My Wife headed over this morning and discovered that they had harvested only a single bushel of plums from the whole orchard. So no plum wine for us today…
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The latest batch of wine is bubbling away happily in the fermenter bucket. It’s Strawberry this time. My wife de-stemmed and trimmed the gooshy parts off of sixteen pounds of berries, which I then washed and crushed mercilessly. Handy tip if you’re thinking about taking up the merciless crushing of strawberries as a hobby: take it in stages. Small quantities of strawberry can easily be crushed between the bottom of a glass and the inside of a mixing bowl. On the other hand, if you try to crush more than about two or three pounds of berries all at once, they’ll gang up on you and form a viscid mass that will try to trap your crushing implement in a sticky grip.
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I had to say goodbye to a dozen bottles of blueberry wine last night. Kinda sad, but necessary. Fermentation had restarted after they’d been bottled, which is kind of a big problem. Several of the corks had been forced part-way out of the bottles, and they probably would have popped all the way out if I hadn’t put those little shrink-wrap caps on them. Instead they just sat there, building up pressure…
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The three most recent batches of wine have been bottled! Actually, they’ve been bottled for a few weeks now, but… you know… the whole not posting due to stress thing.

Anyway.

I’ve got some label art for ’em too, so all I have to do is actually print up the labels and slap them on and there’ll be wine aplenty for drinking and gifts…
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Monday turned into a wine work day. I got the blueberry and cranberry wine racked into new carboys and added finings to the blueberry. The blueberry will be ready for bottling in two weeks or so. I had a little taste of each of them as I was doing the siphon, and they’re both really tasty. I also ordered some supplies, like a bottle tree and a couple more sets of two-part finings. I checked on E. C. Kraus and Homebrew Heaven for what I was after and found that despite their lousy website design, Homebrew Heaven had better prices and more selection, including the really handy auto-shutoff bottle filler.
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I have no idea how the rumor mill works. I picture it as a sort of perpetual motion machine. A complex intertwining of pulleys and levers driven by a huge sail device that turns on the winds of its own gossip. Words move around on conveyor belts, occasionally dropping off into the ears of the mill workers, who sometimes add fresh rumors to the assembly line. Like any industrial situation, there are frequently byproducts, both positive and negative. The current mill byproduct seems to be a good one, precipitated by the discovery by one of the secy’s at work that I make my own wine.
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Two gallons of the batch of pumpkin wine from last January is in bottles. The remainder has been shuffled off into a carboy of its own along with some spices to see how the flavors interact. We took some cinnamon sticks, whole cloves and ground nutmeg, boiled them together in a small saucepan to kill off anything that might live in them, and then strained the spicy smelling result through a coffee filter to cut back on sediment. The wine and spices in their three gallon carboy are a noticeable darker color than the stuff that didn’t get spiced. I’m gonna give it a couple of weeks for the nutmeg to settle out of the solution and then it’ll get bottled too.
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Welcome to Checkuary! That’s the month where you write the previous year’s date on your checks out of habit, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the oeuvre of Rich Hall. And a very special hello to the visitor from Taiwan who hit the site sometime before 4 this morning… Sometimes I love checking the server logs.
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