Author Archives: Erroll

Rhubarb Wine And Tomato Wine: Harvest Complete

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Harvest your rhubarb early in the fall

I pulled in the last of the rhubarb on 10/5/07. The 11 oz (312 g) brought my total for the year to 62 oz (1737 g), which is about what I harvested last year. October is a bit late, and I had to discard many stalks. Next year, I’ll need to get out there and harvest in September.

Prune and train your tomatoes

I was out in the garden during September, that’s when I took the last of the Gold Nuggets. I harvested 4 lb 5 oz (1950 g) on 9/15/07. That brings my total for the year to 17 lb 14 oz (8132 g). I learned a lot this year, but the most important lesson is to make the effort to prune and trellis your tomatoes. I wrote, back in July, about pruning my tomatoes and that I would do it in “baby steps.” Well, baby steps just didn’t cut it. Tomatoes grow fast and furious; you need to be out in those beds, with your hand pruners, a lot to keep them under control. I didn’t do that, and my Gold Nuggets, which are supposed to be self supporting, just flopped over onto the ground and spread out. This meant that a lot of tomatoes were in contact with the ground and/or covered by vegetation. A good trellising system would keep them off the ground and a pruning regimen would direct the growth. The result would be more fruit, less rot, and an easier time harvesting.

Switching hats: from gardener to winemaker

So lessons learned. Next year will be better. In the meantime, I should get about a gallon of rhubarb wine and a gallon of tomato wine. Most of my wine and mead will be from purchased fruit and honey, but these two batches, and the Oregano Wine, are from fruit, vegetables, and herbs that I grew myself. That’s the sort of home winemaking that I love.



Raspberry Wine Recipe

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I made raspberry wine last year. I haven’t talked about it before because I made it and racked it before I started blogging. I also made it before I owned a pH meter or an acid test kit, so I was really flying blind. How do you make raspberry wine without measuring the acidity? I measured what I could, then I consulted Ben Rotter’s table of fruit data. It’s a goldmine of data about sugar, acid, and tannins in fruit as well as juice yield.

Raspberry Wine Recipe

My 10.75 lb (4.9 kg) of raspberries yielded 3 quarts (2.8 liters) of SG 1.050 juice. My notes show that I expected a TA of 14-18 g/L, though when I look at the table now that seems low. I picked the fruit at a U-pick farm after some unusually hot weather. My notes don’t say, but maybe I was expecting the hot weather to lower the acid. At any rate, I dissolved 3 lb (1.4 kg) sugar in 3.3 quarts (3.1 liters) of water. I treated with sulfite, pectic enzyme, and nutrient then pitched the yeast. It fermented to dryness in less than two weeks.

More on raspberry wine

Promising, but too acidic

I did some measurements recently:

SG = 0.992
TA = 14 g/L
pH = 2.96
volume = 1.5 gallons (5.7 liters)

It tasted tart, but it wasn’t the undrinkable firewater you might expect. There was a very nice flavor in there, and it complemented the raspberry aroma very well. I decided to use potassium bicarbonate (KHCO3), to take down the acid a notch, at a 1.5 tsp/Gallon (2.4 g/L) rate. I’m hoping to reduce the acid by 2-3 g/L. I’ve set it aside, with the cherry wine, and intend to taste them both in a few months. Maybe that’s all the raspberry wine needs, or maybe the acidity will still be too much. If so, it’ll be time to sweeten it a little.

Do as I say, not as I do!

I think this is going to have a happy ending, but you really should do your own measurements. Bookmark Ben’s site, and not just for the fruit data, and use it to help make your own recipes, but make final decisions about acid and fruit proportions based on accurate measurements of the fruit you are using.

Update 12/9/2008 – It needed sweetening

It’s still too tart, even after neutralizing some of the acid, so I sweetened my raspberry wine.



Norton: The (Almost) All American Wine Grape

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There are several species of grapes, but the great classic wine grapes are all Vitis vinifera. Maybe that’s because Norton isn’t well known outside the eastern and mid western US. It’s parentage isn’t known exactly, but it’s predominantly Vitis aestivalis with hints of Vitis labrusca and, despite being known as an all-American grape, Vitis vinifera. Growers treat it and Cynthiana as different varietals, though they are genetically indistinguishable, and call it “the Cabernet of the Ozarks.” When I hear something like that, it’s usually a less-worthy grape trying to piggyback on the stature of a noble grape. Not this time. Here’s what Jancis Robinson says about Norton in the The Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd Edition, “Norton is undoubtedly underrated because of the entrenched bias against non-vinifera varieties … The grapes are acidic, but the wine is indistinguishable by taste from wine made from vinifera grapes.”

It gets better. Norton is tolerant of many fungal diseases, including the common ones in my neck of the woods, and phylloxera. Sounds like a grape I’d like to grow! Well there are at least two drawbacks. First, it’s difficult to propagate from hardwood cuttings. Ok, that would be a nuisance, but it is being grown and propagated, so I don’t think that’s a deal breaker. The deal breaker is that it requires a long growing season. There’s a lot to like about the Puget Sound, but we are limited in the wine grapes that will ripen here.

New And Improved Washington Winemaker!

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I use WordPress software to run this blog, and I upgraded to the latest version over the weekend. If all went well, the site should be a little quicker and more secure, but shouldn’t look all that different. I still have some details to work out, but I think the upgrade was a success. If you notice anything wrong with the site, please let me know.

Bonsai Vineyard Harvest Update

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Leon Millot Harvest - 9/26/07


I was on the fence about harvesting the Leon Millot. They were ripe or nearly ripe, but I wondered if they could benefit from a little more time. That was before I saw the weather forecast. It calls for a lot of rain, starting tomorrow, so I pulled in the Leon today.

9/21/07 : 3 oz (100 g)
9/26/07 : 2 lb 2 oz (975 g)

2007 Total: 2 lb 5 oz (1075 g)

That compares with 2 lb (just over 900 g) in 2006.

I started taking some Pinot Noir as well, but changed my mind after three clusters. They’re just not ripe yet, so I’ll leave the rest to face the rain. Those three clusters weighed in at 7 oz (210 g), and will be joining the Leon (and Price and Siegerrebe) in the freezer until I complete the harvest.

Why I Make Dry Wine

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I make wine out of many different fruits and vegetables – from raspberries to rhubarb and all sorts of things in between. That makes for a lot of trial and error as I learn how to consistently make a good wine using very different bases. Many traditional country wine recipes call for a small amount of fruit, a lot of water, enough sugar for 12% alcohol, and acid to balance. You can make (and I have made) good wine this way, and it’s a real money saver. Still, adding a lot of water bothers me and some of the wines I’ve made this way seemed to suffer for it.

That made me wonder what would happen if I used more fruit. What about all fruit and no water? I’m trying this with cherry wine right now, and the first problem I had was in managing the acids. The titratable acidity (TA) of my cherry wine will be high, and that’s something I’ll need to address the next time I make it. I’m working on some ideas, but in the meantime I’ve decided to sweeten the cherry wine. I’ll be trying to balance the acid with sugar and make a drinkable wine out of it.

Learning to make good sweet wine by making good dry wine

I wrote about how to rescue bad wine with sugar on Monday, and the reason this works is also the reason I usually make my wines dry. That might seem strange; if sugar can save bad wines, why can’t it improve any wine? Used correctly, it probably can. Sweet things taste good to all of us, that’s just human physiology. But sugar can mask faults in a wine, and that’s why I stay away from it while I’m learning and experimenting. I need to be able to see the problems in order to fix them. When I understand what I’m doing with a particular wine well enough to make a good one consistently, then I’ll think about making a sweet or off-dry wine.

Primary Fermenters: What size do you need?

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I’m excited about making red wine from grapes this year. It will be my first red, and I needed some new equipment. My largest fermenter has a ten gallon capacity, which is enough for five or six gallons of white wine, but too small for five gallons of red wine. Red wine is fermented on the skins, so you have a larger volume of must than for the same amount of white wine. All that skin and pulp gets forced to the surface, by CO2, forming a “cap.” So the fermenter has to be bigger than the amount of finished wine, to handle the skin and pulp and to contain the cap. How much bigger? A good rule of thumb is that every 5 lb of grapes require 1 gallon of capacity (0.6 kg/liter). For 100 lb (45.5 kg) of grapes, then, I’ll need a 20 gallon (75 liter) fermenter. My local homebrew shop carries 24 gallon (90 liter) fermenters. It’s ok to have a little more room than you need, but it’s a little messy if you’re short so I bought one. All I need now are some grapes!

Rescuing A Bad Wine On Short Notice

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When bad wine happens to good dinners

You’ve doted over the yeast, you’ve clarified and stabilized your wine, you’ve set it aside to age, and now you pop the cork. It looks great – nice and clear with great legs (we’re still talking about the wine) as you swirl it around in your glass. Maybe you can’t identify all the notes, floral? citrus?, but it smells wonderful. Next you take a sip, it’s only been a moment but it seems you’ve been anticipating it for hours, and … yuck! It can’t be. All that time and effort to make (or all that money to buy) a wine that can’t stand up to 2-buck Chuck?

So you take another sip. Well given some more aging, that bitterness might soften. And that tartness will mellow out. And while we’re at it, maybe that … that bizarre flavor will go away too. Wines that age well are often unpalatable when young, so it just might. I’ve seen huge changes, usually for the better, in the course of a year. But what do you do right now? You’ve just sat down to dinner and you’ve got this open bottle of wild plum (at least you’re hoping that fruit you picked were wild plums) wine in front of you.

Is there any way to save a bad wine?

Before you pour the bottle down the drain, and grab another you might try aerating and/or sweetening. You’ve heard that some wines need to breath? I remember chatting with a gentleman at a wine tasting who tames ruffian wines by putting them through the blender. I didn’t do that when my 2006 Apple wine proved too harsh, but a little sugar did wonders for it. I started out by dissolving 0.5 tsp sugar in a wine glass. Marsha and I noticed an immediate improvement, but we still weren’t happy with it. It turns out that 1 tsp per glass was about right. It saved the wine and it saved the dinner.

I’m not going to tell you it works every time, but it’s worth a try.

I Started Harvesting Grapes

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Dark purple grapes, still on stems, set inside a bowl.

The incursion into my bonsai vineyard on Wednesday knocked some grapes to the ground. I gathered these up, ate some, discarded some, and froze the rest. This was the official, if unintentional, start to my grape harvest and it totaled 3 oz (100 g) of Leon Millot. At that point, I decided to bring in the Siegerrebe and the Price. They’re both early ripeners and they seemed ripe when I tasted them. I hand destemmed, lightly washed and froze the grapes. So in addition to my Leon, I’ve got:

11.5 oz (375 g) of Siegerrebe from 1 vine
17 oz (500 g) of Price from 2 vines (I have three, but one didn’t bear this year)

After harvesting three of the eight vines that will bear this year, I have 9.5 oz (290 g) per vine. If that’s the yield I get for the Leon Millot and the Pinot Noir, then I’ll get 4.75 lb (2.3 kg) total this year. Um, that’s a bit less than the 20 lb (9 kg) I wanted!

Critters In The Vineyard!

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Bird netting saved most of the grapes

Marsha was frantic and ran to wake me up this morning. I was still groggy, so it took me a while to figure out that all the grape vines had been knocked down. We didn’t see what happened. Nobody and nothing was about. I think it was an animal, probably a raccoon though. I have bird netting over the vines, and that did two things – one good and one bad. The good thing was protecting most of the grapes. Whatever it was only got two small clusters. The bad thing was binding all the vines to each other, so that when one was knocked down, they all went down.

Pinot Noir cluster on 9/19/07. Black bird netting is clearly visible in front of the grapes.

As you can see in the above photo of a Pinot Noir cluster behind it’s protective bird netting, order was restored. I remember how surprised I was at just how many different kinds of bird netting there is but, as with most things, you can keep the birds out on a budget or opt for a higher end product. I opted for the affordable option.

Planning for the future: Bird netting on a frame and a temporary greenhouse?

One improvement I could make would be to string the netting on some sort of external frame, rather than draping it over the vines an I do now. As birds, raccoons, and other small animals try to get at my grapes, they would jostle the frame instead of the vines. That would make the vines much less likely to tip over. I’ve thought about building such a frame before; I could also hang plastic sheeting on it, turning it into an impromptu greenhouse, in early spring and late fall. That would extend the growing season a bit, and might allow me to experiment with grapes need a warmer climate.

Harvest time is almost here, in fact I may make a point of speeding up the harvest for the earlier varietals, and after that I’ll have all winter to think and plan.