Winemaking Journal

The long process is over. It’s been 5 months (hah, I guess that’s not long for wine) but I finally bottles my Concord-Cranberry Wine last night. I got 14 bottles, plus one unfiltered and one half bottle that I mixed with reduced coconut water just for fun. I had sweetened it, as I said, and maybe a little too much. I also added a little oak extract since it wasn’t toasty enough for my taste (or oaky at all, really). I also bottled by fruit wines, so now I think I officially have a  small inventory.

• 15 bottles concord-cranberry
• 4 bottles white raspberry
• 3 bottles pineappl-orange coconut
• 1 bottle peach

Now to enjoy it! And I guess for now I’m done (well, I have one or two experiments to finish up) but in two weeks I’ll be graduating from RIT with my BFA in New Media Design & Imaging, and at the end of June I’ll be moving down to New York City to start my job at Firstborn Multimedia as a Flash Developer. I figure I’ll have a small studio apartment, so no 3 gallon cardboys but you can bet I’ll have my one gallon milkjug batches going.

Made some labels for the two fruit wines, and already had one made for the concord one.

Well, as of today I no longer have active yeast. I racked my wine into a fresh cardboy, added about 2.5 lbs of sugar to sweeten, as well as campden tablets for preservation and potassium sorbate to stop the yeast. I also added some oak extract to increase the oak flavor and sparkeloid to clarify it. In one week it will be ready for bottling!

The first batch of wine, the 100% concord, is ruined - it got infected with something. I noticed stuff floating on top the other day. It smelled off too. So today I dumped three gallons of spoiled wine down the drain. I also racked the other concord wine, which is fine, but really sour so I added sugar to it, I guess I’ll see how it goes. Now I defiantly understand why nobody really wants to use concord, or any of the North American grapes.

It’s only been a day since I started my orange/pineapple coconut wine, and it is going crazy. In all of my experiments so far, I have not seen such a quick reaction. There is usually a day or two of relatively little action, but not this time. This morning there was a hearty foam on the top, and right now it has a steady stream of bubbles. My theory is that the orange and pineapple juice have a higher acidity, which yeast love, and they’re just going crazy right now. Additionally, the juice had layered out, with the bottom 2/3 of the jug having a cloudy pulpy mixture, and the top being clear. (And there’s also the top coating of coconut chunks too). I wonder if a cheese cloth is fine enough to strain out most of the pulp, because I really don’t want to have to use coffee filters.

Time to make some more wine! I liked doing the one gallon milk jug ferment like I did with the peach. About one gallon will give you about four or five 750mL bottles, depending on how well you filter/siphon it. My girlfriend made me a delicious chocolate cake for my birthday, which we got a coconut for to coat the cake with fresh shavings. I had the leftover coconut water, like maybe not even a full cup, and no idea what to do with it. So, what do you do when you have leftover fruit juice? Ferment it!

I got a different type of juice, concentrated “White Raspberry” which is raspberry and white grape (and is colored red). I mixed that with the tiny bit of coconut juice, added a lot of sugar to bump it up to 1.170  SG (my last wine was dry, I want a sweeter one). I threw in a few sticks of cinnamon, and let it go. That was on March 16th,  and it’s slowly dropping in sugar levels. Once it calms down I’ll transfer it to a new milk jug.

Today I started another wine experiment, maybe one a little more strange. This one is Orange/Pineapple/Coconut. Like my other milk jug wines,  it has three cans of concentrate, this time pineapple orange. Th, to reconstitute it, I used four cans of coconut water (I could have used five but I only bought four, so there is some water). I mixed that up, raised it to only 1.140 SG (I ran out of room in the jug) and added my yeast and other goodies. The orange juice doesn’t have pulp, but it is cloudy, so I hope that settles out or I’ll have to filter it. It needs to be run though a cheese cloth anyways, since the coconut water has chunks of meat in it. Once I do that, I might add a little more sugar to it so I can get it a little sweeter.

Oh, and for an airlock: just cut a hole in a milk jug cap,  insert a regualar two chamber bubbler, and seal it with hot glue.

I bottled up some of my fruit peach wine. And it came out pretty well. I learned a lesson here about racking: you need to do it. The bottles have so much lee at the bottom it’s pretty nasty, so make sure you rack atleast once, otherwise when you pour your wine you might kick up sediment, plus, you’ll get the yeasty lees taste. The peach wine taste best chilled, and  does not taste like peach. It’s very high in acid and alcohol. The best way I can explain the taste is like a dry oaked chardonnay, except without the toasty flavor. I bought a corker and a 100 corks, so I’m good to go more or less on bottling.

Racked the 2nd jug of wine today, the concord/cranberry one.

Transfered the first batch of wine to a new cardboy tonight. I hope taking it off of the lees helps mature the flavor. I also got a replacement bubbler for the second batch. I also took the experimental peach wine and racked that from the lees, I just put it in another milk jug and capped it, I figure a little carbonation might be nice. I also sampled it and it was pretty decent.

My cat was playing in the basement today, crawling around the piles of crap that’s stored back there, and knocked over a big metal tripod which decapitated one of my bubblers.  I think it was only off for maybe two or three hours, so I am going to hope that it will be alright. I sealed the cardboy off by sticking a piece of wax paper over the opening and shoving in the bung. I’m going to try and get a replacement tomorrow, and might as well pick up the next cardboy I need since I think I need to get batch #1 off of the lees. I think I’ll use the leftover cardboy to do this.