Author Archives: Erroll

The Gift Of Wine: How to buy it

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Wine can make a great gift. You’ve got to pick a good one, of course, and it has to be a style that your victim loved one enjoys, but there is more to it than that. I have a new favorite wine. I bought two cases in the past few months (that’s a lot for me), and I know people who like this style of wine. But I won’t give any of it away because it would make a terrible gift.

Every gift tells a story

My current favorite wine is inexpensive. If you saw the label, you’d probably recognize it and the first thing that would come to mind is how little it costs. If that’s what they think when they open your gift, they’ll mean it when they say, “you shouldn’t have!” It won’t matter if it blows away other wines at it’s price point (it does) and it won’t matter if it beats many mid-priced wines (it does that too), it will just be the cheap gift. And no, you can’t make it up in volume by giving them a lot of it.


Buying a good wine that costs more isn’t really enough. If you want to make someone happy with your gift it should tell a story. What kind of story? Let’s look at Wine Spectator’s top 100 wines of 2009. You can make a lot of valid criticisms about lists like that, but none of that criticism will matter if you bought someone the Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Columbia Valley Reserve 2005. You wouldn’t just be giving them a very good wine, you’d be giving them Wine Spectator’s Number One Wine of 2009. Now that’s a great story! Unfortunately the wine is sold out and very difficult to come by, so most people won’t be able to use this as practical advice. On the other hand, if you can get some, then not only would it be Wine Spectator’s top choice, but it would be Sold Out And Really Hard To Get!

A good story can be personal

A while back, I set out to find the best Washington State Lemberger. I couldn’t survey the 650+ wineries in the state, but I did my homework. I visited wineries and wine shops and talked to the owners, employees, and customers. I did some online research. Finally I had three Lembergers that I wanted to try. I arranged a tasting party and one of my guests, Chef Ralph, brought a fourth. We tasted, we took notes, we disagreed, we ate, we had a great time.

In the end, the Lady of the House and I had a new favorite Lemberger and it would be the perfect gift for a red wine drinker on my list. Not just a good red wine, not just a good wine from Washington, but my top pick after looking for the best Washington State Lemberger.

One story does not work for everyone

Except Chef Ralph. Neither of us knew this until all the wines were tasted, all the notes were taken, and all the wines were ranked, but he ranked my favorite (and I ranked his) dead last. I don’t know what that says exactly (we have different tastes? the wines were very close?) but if I bought it for him the story would be “his last choice.”

I’ll be using experiences like that to pick wines for people I know, and next week I’ll talk about giving homemade wine as a gift (no, I didn’t forget about that!)



Mulled Wine

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Adding sweeteners and spices to wine then serving it hot – sounds a bit like herbal tea with alcohol, doesn’t it? – was something I never understood. I’m giving it another look this Christmas season because I happen to like herbal tea, it’s something new (to me anyway), and I’ve got some bland wine that I don’t know what to do with. I was excited when I made wine from supermarket grapes, but in the end I didn’t want to drink it. Sweetening didn’t help, but maybe mulling will.

Mulling Spices

In researching mulled wine (in cookbooks, Wikipedia, search engines, my Mom), the same ingredients keep coming up:

Ingredient Amount per Bottle of Wine
cinnamon 1-2 sticks
cloves 6
citris (juice and/or zest) from half an orange or one lemon
sugar or honey about half a cup

Also common are vanilla, nutmeg, ginger, and cardamon. You sometimes see pepper, peppercorns, nuts, and raisins too.

Making Mulled Wine

Dissolved sugar or honey in water (about half a cup to a cup – enough to dissolve and cover everything, but no more), bring to a boil, take off heat, add spices, and cover. If using citrus juice, use a little more sugar/honey and a little less water. Let sit on low heat for about 20 minutes. Strain and add wine. Heat the combined mixture (but don’t boil) and serve hot.

This ought to work just as well with mead or cider – maybe even beer.

You can omit the water and stir everything into the wine, then heat the wine – I’ve seen recipes take either approach. I prefer to do the dissolving and extraction separately to guard against boiling the wine.

Straining out the spices might be easier if you use a tea bag or tea ball.

Citrus juice might help by adding flavor if your wine is bland. If you’re going to be zesting, for mulled wine or anything else, a dedicated zesting tool is a godsend.

Final Thoughts

I’m excited about making mulled wine this year. I haven’t decided on a commercial mix or making it from scratch – maybe I’ll try both. I’d love to hear about your experiences with mulled wine – triumphs, disasters, better methods. If you’re having trouble finding supplies, check out my new mulled wine store.

Update 12/13/2010 – A great eggnog recipe!

Eggnog is another tasty treat for the holidays, and this eggnog recipe won’t disappoint!



How To Make Bland Wine: Use grocery store grapes

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Click here for a larger image and technical details about the shot
Wine from store-bought table grapes

I like to experiment. It’s a great feeling when a crazy idea turns into an enjoyable wine. Crazy ideas are unpredictable, though, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. The wine I made from store-bought tables grapes falls into the “don’t” category. What went wrong? Nothing.  I got a balanced dry wine with no faults or off flavors. But its so bland I don’t want to drink it. Sometimes sweetening can tease out a little fruitiness in a wine. I tried that and wound up with sweet bland wine that I still don’t want to drink.

Make Welch’s Wine Instead

If you’re looking for winemaking ingredients at the grocery store, go to the freezer section and buy concentrated frozen grape juice. It’s easier to make wine from frozen concentrate because you don’t have to process the grapes. It’s cheaper too:

Cost of table grape wine
Item Quantity Unit Cost Total
Grapes 20 lb $0.88/lb $17.60
Sugar 20 lb $0.50/lb $17.60
Corks 6 $0.35 $2.10
Total $17.60

I got six bottles, so that works out to just under $3/bottle for bland wine that I don’t like compared to under $1/bottle for a lively, enjoyable Welch’s wine.

Improving table grape wine

I know that some people regularly make wine from Thomson Seedless (Sultana) grapes, and they often cold soak to extract more flavor. If I make this again, I’ll probably do that. Fermenting on the skin, like a red wine, might be worth a try too. Another approach is to add flavorings: vanilla and chocolate extract come to mind. Have you had better luck making wine from grocery store grapes? I’d love to hear about it.

About the label

The best thing about this wine is the label, and I want to thank Mark Hammergren for letting me use his The Truckstop artwork. The idea for putting Lost’s Dharma logo on the wine came to me after I realized I couldn’t rescue this batch. Mark’s take on it combined femininity, humor, and a new Dharma station concept that’s perfect for this wine – thanks Mark!

Update 12/3/2009 – Can I fix it by making mulled wine?

If the problem is bland flavor, then maybe mulling spices will liven it up. Using spices like cinnamon, cloves, and citrus zest (ok, I don’t think zest is technically a spice) in wine, then serving it warm goes back a long way. I’ve never made mulled wine before, so I’m really excited about it – might be a new Christmas tradition for me!

Moving Full Carboys

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Maybe you sold your house, maybe you decided to rent a different apartment, but for whatever reason you’re moving. How do you transport your carboys and jugs without breaking them or spilling anything? I was in exactly that situation and I managed to get my fermenting and aging wine from the old house to the new house without incident. Here’s how I did it:

Bottle it!

By far the best way is to bottle your wine or mead, pack it well, and ship it. I was able to bottle some of my wine by moving day and I just turned that over to the movers. Most of it was in commercial wine boxes with cardboard dividers, but some of it was in ordinary moving boxes with each bottle wrapped in newspaper. However you do it, make sure the bottles are packed to they don’t move and that glass doesn’t touch glass.

Move the jugs in a cooler

I had quite a bit of aging/fermenting wine, and not a lot of free time. So by moving day I had a lot of 1-gallon jugs with airlocks that I needed to move. As with the bottles, packing the jugs so that glass does not touch glass and they don’t move will prevent breakage. But there will be bumps and there will be sloshing. That could lead to spilling and popped airlocks. One way to handle this would be to replace the airlocks with solid bungs and tape them into place, but even if you do this (I didn’t) you should still plan for spills.

I did this by packing the 1-gallon jugs into a large (37.5 gallon – 142 liter) cooler. It held all of my jugs, with airlocks, and I was still able to close the lid. Now the jugs were prevented from moving, protected from impact, and enclosed in a watertight cooler. The cooler went in the back of my SUV, and the jugs made the trip without breaks or leaks.

Use nested garbage bags to contain spills from a carboy

I had one carboy to move and no waterproof container to put it in, so I turned to large plastic garbage bags. I place the carboy into one bag, let’s call it the “bottom bag.” The other bag, cleverly named “top bag,” draped over the carboy. I tucked the top bag inside the bottom bag, then pulled the bottom bag up to enclose the carboy. Once I fastened the bottom bag in place with tape, even a violent spill would be contained.

The waterproofed carboy joined the large cooler in the back of my SUV, where I nestled it between boxes, towels, old clothes and whatever else was handy. After I was satisfied that it was well padded and immobile, I headed for my new home. Like the 1-gallon jugs, the carboy, and – more importantly – the blueberry mead inside it, arrived in fine shape.

There might be better ways of doing it, and I’d love to hear about them, but this is how I did it and it worked. Remember: immobilize, protect, and waterproof. It’s worth the effort so you can – and you really should – pop open some home made wine when you get to your new place!

Wine and breakfast cereal?

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Once upon a time, food and wine pairing was as simple as, “red wine with meat and white wine with fish.” Then I learned about full bodied whites that can stand up to meat and realized that it can get more complicated. Then I thought about Asian food and chocolate. After some work, I came up with good pairings for them and started to think I was doing pretty well.

Then I came across this video discussing wine pairing with breakfast cereal, and that’s when I gave up! He insists that it’s not a joke and he starts out with his favorite pairing, Cap’n Crunch with a $30 bottle of Riesling, and goes on to discuss two others.

I can’t say I’m convinced, but I know at least one “meal” with wine and cereal is in my future. Once she hears about it, no power in the universe will keep the Lady of the House from trying it. By comparison, it makes my Superbowl wine seem downright respectable – cheers.

Apple Wine: Processing the apples

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Apple harvest has begun in my backyard, and that’s got me thinking about wine. I’ve made a lot of apple wine, and processed apples a lot of different ways. Blenders and juicers both work, but you have to chop all the apples and process them in batches. I can’t find the notes, but I remember using sugar extraction for one batch. The trouble with all of these methods is the chopping; it’s tedious and doesn’t scale well. What I’d really like is a way to process apples that’s quick, cheap, and easy.

So I’ve been on the lookout for other ideas, and that’s how I came across Luc Volders apple a day post. What I like about Mr Volders is that he doesn’t just take ideas at face value; he puts them to the test. In this post he rigorously compares several methods of juicing apples.

To me, freezing the whole apple offers a big payoff in convenience over the other methods and I think I’ll give that a try this year. He reported a 68% juice yield, which is slightly less than some of the other methods (70 – 74%). If I don’t have to chop all those apples, it’s a price well worth paying. I’ll probably modify his approach and freeze the apples without coring them, add pectic enzyme and sulfite as they are thawing and allow them to thaw without separating the free run juice. This way, the enzyme and sulfite can work on all the juice.

I’m excited about the new process, and I’ll write about how it works out. Right now, it’s time to pop the cork on one of last year’s bottles and hit the send button …

Update 9/14/2010 – A partial success

I got a 34-36% juice yield from 8 lb of apples, which is pretty low. This method is basically a way to crush apples without a crusher. They still need to be pressed to get a good yield and that’s where I need to do better. Building or buying a small press? Using more fruit so I can use my 3-bucket press? Maybe. Using a sanitized spatula again? Definitely not!

Overlake Cabernet Sauvignon

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Overlake Cabernet SauvignonI was happy enough with the Fetzer Cabernet from Trader Joe’s to give another of their budget Cabernets a try. Like the Fetzer, this comes recommended by Jason, and it set me back $6.

Running the numbers

Couldn’t find any information about this wine, so the only reported measurement I have is 14.75% alcohol. My measurements are:

SG: 0.994, pH: 3.72, TA: 3 g/L

There aren’t many winemaking books that tell you to shoot for a pH of 3.7 or a TA of 3 g/L. What do you get when you put that together with high alcohol and low sugar?

An easy drinking red

“Buttery.” So said the Lady of the House, but I didn’t pick up on that. She didn’t say, but I could tell she was thinking, that it wasn’t the only thing I didn’t pick up on! But getting back to the wine, this is a simple big red that goes down easy. We both liked it with spaghetti and sausage, and I’m going to add it to my list of superbowl wines.

Introducing the Wine Recipe Wizard

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Introducing Washington Winemaker’s new Wine Recipe Wizard! This is a more robust version of a spreadsheet I’ve been using to create wine recipes. Use it to go from juice to must by adding sugar, water, and acid. The Wizard is designed to tell you exactly how much of each – all you need to do is tell it about your juice (specific gravity, titratable acidity, and volume) and what you want the must to be like (specific gravity and titratable acidity).

This is how I make rhubarb wine, apple wine, raspberry wine, cherry wine, and others. Juice, measure, adjust, then ferment. The Wizard helps with the “adjust” step.

Give it a try – Give me some feedback

I’m not sure there’s a first version of anything that’s perfect, and I don’t expect this to be an exception. There are ways to make it better, and I don’t know all of them. So if you think of one, let me know. I wanted to get it out quickly – for Rachel, Paul, and everyone else who’s been waiting for me to do this – and that meant leaving some unfinished business:

Known Issues

  • You have to enter the volume in liters, and this probably isn’t ideal for US users. I plan to add a radio button that allows you to select US or metric units, but in the meantime remember that 1 gallon = 3.785 liters.
  • You can only use sugar syrup with a specific gravity of 1.310. Another radio button will be coming soon that will allow honey or custom values.
  • The Wizard doesn’t handle juices that are sweeter and more acidic than the must. So if your juice SG is higher than the must SG and your juice TA is higher than your must TA, you will get an error message.
  • There are some limits on what values you can enter, but it will still allow you to specify a must that is impossible to create with a standard sugar syrup. In cases like that the Wizard will tell you to add negative volumes of stuff – you won’t run into this for real world juices and ordinary musts, but it’s a bug that is in there and I do plan to fix it.

I’m excited about this, I’ll keep working on it, and I hope it helps.

Welch’s Wine: Cheap, quick, and surprisingly good

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Welch's WineI just bottled this wine made from concentrated frozen Niagara grape juice – yep, wine from Welch’s grape juice. With good winemaking technique, you can turn this humble ingredient into a crisp dry white wine that’s surprisingly good and perfect for summer.

From a starting gravity of about 1.090, it fermented out to 0.992 and I did not sweeten. I know a lot of people will want to sweeten, but I advise against it. Mainly because it’s very good as a dry wine, but also because I’m afraid that sweetening will bring out a “grape juice” flavor. In fact, if you’re making fruit wine and want it taste more of raspberries, strawberries, or whatever you made it from, sweetening will bring some of the that fruit flavor out. That can be a good thing, but not in this case.

It’s acidic, with titratable acidity (TA) of 7 g/L and pH of 3. It may not look like it from the numbers, but this dry acidic wine is easy to drink – even at five months old.

How much does Welch’s wine cost?

From time to time, the concentrate goes on sale for $1/can. When it does I buy 12 cans, add about 6 lb (2.75 kg) of sugar and water to six gallons (23 liters). This gets me at least 5 gallons (19 liters) of finished wine. Here are the details:

Cost of Welch’s wine
Quantity Unit Cost Total
12 cans concentrate 1$/can $12
6 lb sugar $0.50/lb $3
25 corks $0.35/cork $8.75
Total – $23.75

Less than $1/bottle! To simplify, I didn’t include the cost of yeast, acid, or nutrient. They would add a tiny bit to the cost. Using cheaper closures (bag in a box, crown caps) would push the cost down.

Every winemaker should make Welch’s wine

Keeping yourself stocked up on Welch’s wine means never having to worry about topping up. Come up a little short on today’s racking? Pop open one of these.

You can also use a wine like this to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth from other wine. Store bought or homemade, they all should pass this simple test. Is it convincingly better than this $1/bottle wine in a blind tasting? If not, then why spend $10 on that Chardonnay or $150 on that high end kit? Don’t get me wrong; some will be better, but now you’ll know which ones.

But it’s a good wine in it’s own right, and that’s the best reason to make it. Crisp but easy to drink, it’s a good simple wine that you’ll want to have on hand.

About the label

When I started making this wine the headlines were pretty dire. This wine went from fermentation to bottle in less than six months and it cost less than 1$/bottle – and that includes 35 cents for the cork. Throw in easy drinking good flavor and you’ve got the perfect wine for hard times. So I decided to call it “Bailout Blanc.”

To label a wine like that, I wanted artwork that conveyed the stress most people are feeling in a lighthearted way. There are lots of way to do that, but Ferrell McCollough’s photo Chris Overworked really stood out. The composition and the post processing come together perfectly, and he was gracious enough to let me use it on my label.

You see a larger photo of the bottle here.

2006 Fetzer Valley Oaks Cabernet Sauvignon

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2006 Fetzer Valley Oaks Cabernet SauvignonJason mentioned this wine favorably on his blog, and I decided to give it a try. I bought it at Trader Joe’s for $6.50. That’s a good price to go along with the good recommendation. Now lets have a look under the cork.

Running the numbers

I’ll start with the usual analysis. Fetzer didn’t have information on the 2006 vintage, and they ignored my e-mail asking for it. They indicated 13.5% alcohol on the bottle and reported this for 2007:

13.49% Alcohol • Titratable Acidity (TA) 6.3 g/L • pH: 3.47 • RS: 0.6g/L (dry)

and here are my measurements of the 2006 vintage:

Specific Gravity (SG): 0.994 • pH: 3.5 • TA: 5 g/L

I like to include these measurements so you and I can compare them with our own homemade wine. If a commercial wine tastes particularly good and well balanced, I want to look at the measurements to see how they did it. The most important measurements, of course, are the ones you do with your nose and your palate. How did the Fetzer measure up?

Going back for more

Jason, I owe you one. This is a nice wine that’s great with pasta or steak on the grill. The Lady of the House and I enjoyed a bottle with dinner of ziti and meatballs. It would also make a terrific Superbowl wine. I don’t rate wines on a 100-point scale, but I can tell you that you get more than you pay for with this wine. I’m going back to buy more.