Ok, it hasn’t got a lot to do with making wine, but I’ve been waiting a long time for tonight’s episode of Lost. I made a wine from Old Orchard Concord grape concentrate, yep the kind you buy in the grocery store, and labeled it in honor of the show. This sort of wine will never be great; you won’t rave about the complexity or delight in picking up subtle notes of … anything. But it’s surprisingly good and you can make it for less than $1 a bottle.
Chocolate: Always too small, but never the wrong size
My latest store sells chocolate for special occasions. Chocolate is a great gift, and not just for Valentine’s Day. While other things might be returned for all sorts of reasons: doesn’t fit, wrong color, already have one, why would I ever want one, when was the last time anyone returned chocolate? From “Road Less Traveled” truffles made by Sensual Chocolatiers to chocolates filled with Bailey’s Irish Cream (kinda like peanut butter cups for grown ups), you can buy the perfect gift for someone – even if you know nothing about them.
It’s gonna be a great Valentine’s Day!
Ok, it’s not often you go to a football game and hear one of the vendors bellowing, “Ice cold Chenin Blanc here!” Beer is the beverage of choice for tailgate parties, but wine definitely has it’s place in your Superbowl festivities. What could better with pizza than a full bodied red? It’s pizza with the guys watching the game though, not fancy dress with your significant other, so you don’t want to break the bank. My choice would be Lindemans Bin 50 Shiraz, a bargain red that doesn’t taste like a bargain.
Still whites would be harder to fit into a Superbowl party, but if you like whites stick to full flavored ones like Sauvignon Blanc. I just placed an order for the Viu Manent 2006 Sauvignon Blanc based on a good review. I haven’t tried it yet, but it would be my choice for a still white on game day.
Sparkling wine seems like on obvious choice, but you shouldn’t waste good wine by shaking the bottle and spraying it on all your friends. For something a little different than Champaign, try Prosecco. It’s an Italian sparkling wine that’s a little sweeter and more fruity than the French variety. A good one to try is il Prosecco, which comes in a distinctive bottle topped with a crown cap (like beer!).
So, by all means, stock up on beer for the Superbowl, but don’t forget the wine.
Photo courtesy of Aaron Edwards who has made it available under the creative commons license – thanks Aaron!
How do you tell a diamond in the ruff from an overpriced “bargain?” Compare it against a wine you know in a blind tasting. It’s the only way to set aside the mental baggage we all carry and see a wine as it really is. Here’s a quick and easy way to do your own blind tasting at home.
Crushing and pressing is a great way to get juice from most berries, but this isn’t a one size fits all approach. Sugar extraction is a good way to “juice” hard fruits and vegetables. To do this, cut up the fruit/vegetables into 0.5 inch (1.25 centimeter) pieces and cover with sugar.
In the photo, I’ve covered about 3.9 lb (1.8 kg) of rhubarb with 1 lb (450 g) of sugar. The sugar draws moisture out of the rhubarb, and in a few days I strained off this juice. After that, I put the rhubarb back in the bucket and covered with water, as a rinse, and strained again. I’ve used this procedure in making rhubarb wine and apple wine.
I’ve been anticipating this since May, and now it’s finally time to make Rhubarb Wine. I grow the rhubarb in my garden, harvest several times (freezing each harvest), and make a gallon or two of wine every year. Here’s how I do it:
3-4 lb (1.4-1.8 kg) rhubarb
Sugar to specific gravity 1.090 – up to 4 lb (1.8 kg) sugar
0.125 tsp (0.3 g) tannin
1 tsp (5 g) diammonium phosphate (DAP)
1 tsp (2.3 g) pectic enzyme
sulfite to 50 ppm (equivalent to 1.5 campden tablets)
yeast
I’ve tried things like cutting it up and putting it in a blender and soaking in water. The best ways to “juice” rhubarb are freeze/thaw and sugar extraction. I usually do both. As you harvest the rhubarb, wash it and cut it up into 0.5 inch (1.25 centimeter) pieces and freeze them. When you are ready to make wine, thaw the rhubarb and put it in a strainer. I usually get 2/3 – 3/4 cup/pound (350-400 ml/Kg) of rhubarb juice this way. Once you’ve strained the juice, sulfite it. Next, place the rhubarb in a container and cover with about 1 lb (about 450 grams) of sugar. Let it sit until the sugar has dissolved (about two or three days), then strain off the liquid. Place the rhubarb back in the container and cover with water for a few hours or overnight. This is a rinse to get every last bit of “rhubarbness.” Strain the liquid and discard the spent rhubarb. At this point, I dissolved the tannin, DAP, and pectic enzyme in 0.25 cups (about 60 ml) of water and added it to the liquid.
I repeated the sugar extraction step, so I used 2 lb (about 825 g) of sugar, and ended up with 2.36 quarts (2.23L) of SG 1.114 liquid. I’m going to switch to metric measures, because calculations are easier, and report numbers with much more precision than I can measure so that I don’t carry rounding errors from one step to the next. I’m aiming for 5.68L of must with an SG of 1.090. Adding 3.568L of SG 1.075 sugar water will yield 5.8L of 1.090 must. An SG of 1.075 implies 232 g of sugar in each liter of solution (not 232 g added to 1L of water!). So 3.568L at 232 g/L means 828 grams of sugar. I boiled 1L of water, took it off heat, dissolved the sugar, and brought it back to a boil. Once it was boiling, I took the pan off the heat and cooled it in a water bath for 15 minutes. I used a measuring cup to determine the volume of sugar water (1.45L) and added it to my fermenter. Then I added tap water until I reached 3.568L total.
I added the sugary rhubarb juice to the sugar-water in the fermenter and measured the specific gravity. I should have 5.8L of SG 1.090 must, and I measured the SG as 1.095 – my kitchen scale and measuring cups were never going to be very accurate, so I’m calling that good!
If you’ve read many of my posts, you’re probably wondering why I haven’t mentioned the acidity of the must. I’m always going on about how important pH is to stability and titratable acidity (TA) is to taste. What’s going on? I’ve made rhubarb wine for years, and I’ve found that using rhubarb at a rate of 1.5-3 lb/Gallon (180 – 360 g/L) of must consistently gets me close to 6 g/L acidity. So I’ve decided to wait until it ferments out, then measure the acid and make any corrections.
Some wine makers neutralize virtually all the acid in rhubarb, then add back acid (tartaric, citric, or a blend). They do this to remove the oxalic acid, which is toxic and present in rhubarb. Removing the oxalic acid will change the wine; I think it detracts from rhubarb’s unique character. Most of the oxalic acid is in the leaves, and I make rhubarb wine with the stalks only (so should you!). It’s true that the stalks contain some oxalic acid, and while I don’t know what the precise amount is or exactly how much of this acid can be dangerous, I can tell you that I’ve made – and consumed – rhubarb wine this way for years with no ill effects. Obviously, I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought it was harmful, but you’ll have to make your own judgment about that.
With nothing left to do, it’s time to pitch the yeast. They’re the real wine makers, and they should have this must turned into wine in the next week or so. Then I’ll rack as needed, and bottle in about a year. It’ll be drinkable soon after that, but it ages very well, so keep a few bottles if you can.
Making good wine is expensive, but not in the way you might think. Oh sure, the things that top growers do to improve the quality of their harvest add to the cost. They analyze the soil and amend it to enhance their crop. They prune and train their vines, even to the point of plucking off individual leaves so that sunlight falls on the vine in just the right way, to keep their vines healthy and ensure that they bear the best fruit possible. They harvest in the early morning, when it’s still dark, and rush them to the winery so that the grapes are at their peak during crush.
Winemakers then dote over the wine. They select just the right yeast. They adjust the sugar and acid levels to balance the wine. The may inoculate with malolactic bacteria to soften the wine, introduce tiny, controlled amounts of oxygen so that wine ages in just the right way, and so on.
But scientists at the California Institute of Technology have found a simpler way: just raise the price. They asked volunteers to taste five different wines and told them the price of each one. What they didn’t tell them was that there were only three different wines. They had the volunteers taste a $90 bottle of wine twice, telling them it was a different $10 bottle of wine the second time. Similarly, a $5 bottle of wine reappeared as a $45 bottle. Functional MRIs showed that people liked the “more expensive” wine better – that is, the pleasure center of the brain showed more intense activity when they tasted the same wine, but believed it was more expensive.
Oh, and when they repeated the experiment without telling the volunteers how much the wine cost, the $5 bottle was rated highest.
The National Academy of Sciences published the study. Here is a link to the abstract:
Unfortunately, you must subscribe or buy one-time access to read the full article.
Another study indicates that a higher price can “improve” a painkiller’s effectiveness.
Tasting blind lets you see a wine the way it really is. Here’s how to run a quick and easy blind tasting at home.
Method #1: Soak and scrape
I know I’m not the only home winemaker who cleans and reuses commercial wine bottles, but the labels on these bottles are getting more stubborn every year. I like to use the “soak and scrape” method. The first step, immersing the bottles in water and Oxiclean
Method #2: Buy wine with easily removed labels:
If you do this often enough, you’ll begin to notice that some labels always come off easily. On the other hand, some wineries act as if the fate of the planet depends on their labels not coming off for the next 10,000 years. I don’t want to single out Columbia Crest by name, but when I buy their wine, I do so knowing that I won’t get a reusable bottle out of the deal. There was a time when I would switch from ruler to ice scraper, from ice scraper to razor blade, and from razor blade to steel wool to get every last label off of every last bottle. These days, some wine bottles end up in the recycle bin again. I also buy Charles Shaw, yep that’s Trader Joe’s “Three Buck Chuck”, more often. Ok, nobody is going to gush about the complexity or refinement of the wine, but it’s not half bad and the labels come right off after a good soak!
I was thinking about cranberry wine a few weeks ago, and mentioned that a local winery made some. It turns out that they call it “Cranberry Jubilee,” and I suspect the wording is deliberate. They’d probably get into legal trouble if they called their 20% cranberry 80% Chardonnay blend “Cranberry Wine.” Well, they might have some legal trouble anyway, but over not over that.
A tiff over a name
The winery, owned by three women and known for its “working girl” series of wines, is named “Olympic Cellars,” after the Olympic Peninsula in which they are located. It turns out that the U.S. Olympic Committee has exclusive, far reaching, and iron fisted rights to the word “Olympic” in the U.S. This goes way beyond normal trademark law in that no business or organization may use the O word without their permission. Normally, other outfits may use trademarked words for unrelated products or services. That’s why Fidelity National Financial, a title insurance company, and Fidelity Investments, the mutual fund and brokerage company, aren’t at each other’s throats.
An “amicable” demand
So how did this little winery escape the wrath of The Committee up to now? There’s an exception to the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act for businesses in the geographical area. Olympic Cellars is located in the Olympic Peninsula, but The Committee’s lawyers have threatened to sue unless Olympic Cellars turns down internet orders from people who haven’t visited the winery. So, someone vacationing in the Olympic Peninsula that visits the winery and signs up for their newsletter can go back home and order wine from them over the internet. Even The Committee won’t complain about that, but if the neighbors hear about this great little winery and try to order some, Olympic Cellars is supposed to turn them down. If they were to ship that bottle of wine to the neighbors, it would, “dilute the committee’s control of its trademarked word, and confuse people about which companies are official Olympic supporters.” The Committee goes on to say, and I’m not making this up, that they want to settle the matter amicably.
Further reading
This article goes into detail about Olympic Cellars trouble with The Committee, and this one tells of an author who faced The Committee’s wrath over a travel guide.
A few months ago, I described an easy way to clean a large fermenter, and concluded that, “It takes very little time and effort on your part, leaving you free to make more wine!” I wasn’t wrong about that, but there is a little snag lurking in that happy and optimistic statement: you have to actually take the time and make the effort or it won’t get done. It’s a problem I hinted at in my article on washing bottles, when I talked about setting bottles aside “until I can wash them.”
Sad but true: They won’t clean themselves
It turns out that a lot of things get set aside for a not-quite-as-brief-as-I’d-hoped interval. I know you bachelors out there are confused, “Just do that later, we’ve got wine to make!” you’re thinking. I know because that’s what I thought. But, stay with me for a minute, what happens when the things you need to make wine with need cleaning? What happens when other things, that you may not need right now, form a physical barrier in your wine making room? Right now there’s a 5-gallon bucket filled with water sitting in my utility sink. The place I’d move it to, next to the sink, is occupied by more buckets that need cleaning. The other side of the sink? One-gallon jugs that need to be cleaned. Some of you may have realized where I’m going with this. Sometimes you’ve got to do the cleaning today so you can make wine later.