Category Archives: Country Wine

Wine from apples, rhubarb, herbs, cherries, or anything else except grapes

Rhubarb Wine With No Added Water?

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I make rhubarb wine every year. I get about 6 fl oz/lb (400 ml/kg) of juice when I thaw frozen rhubarb, and since I use about 3 lb/gal (360 g/L) of rhubarb I need to add a lot of water. But 6 fl oz/lb scales up to over 4.5 gallons from 100 lb of “fruit.” That’s not far from the yield I expect from grapes, and it made me wonder about making rhubarb wine without added water. When the Lynfred Winery announced a commercial rhubarb wine, I wondered even more. Can commercial wineries add water? I don’t think they can, so I asked them how they made their wine. They were kind enough to explain their method: thaw frozen rhubarb, add sugar to about 20 Brix, then pitch the yeast. No added water and no neutralizing the oxalic acid. They did mention that the wine needed residual sugar to balance the acid.

I think I’m going to need a lot of rhubarb this year … and maybe a bottle of Lynfred’s Rhubarb.

Knowledge is power: What winemakers need to know about rhubarb

For more information about rhubarb, like how acidic is it? how much sugar? and other things winemakers need to know when they make rhubarb wine, see here ~ Know Your Ingredients: Rhubarb.

Update 3/28/2011: Commercial Raspberry Wine is made the same way

Homemade raspberry wine is also made with a small amount of fruit and a lot of water. Why? Rhubarb and raspberries are both highly acidic, so commercial wineries approach raspberry wine the same way Lynfred makes rhubarb wine: All fruit with little or no added water, sugar to bring the must up to wine strength, and sweetening to balance the acidity.

Rhubarb Wine Recipe

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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:

Ingredients For 1.5 gallons (about 5.7 liters) of must

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

How do you juice rhubarb?

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.

Measure then adjust the sugar

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!

What about the pH and titratable acidity?

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.

Isn’t the oxalic acid dangerous?

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.

Wine, Women, and Lawsuits?

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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.

Tomato Wine: First Racking

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Ten days after pitching the yeast, I siphoned the translucent, yellow, tomato wine into two 1-gallon jugs and a 1.5L magnum bottle. So 18 lb (8.2 kg) of tomatoes, 4.8 lb (2.2 kg) sugar, and 2.5 quarts (2.4 liters) water turned into about 9 liters (a little under 2.5 gallons) of wine. I still don’t have a good idea of what tomato wine will taste like. At this point it’s just tart and young. Lets see what happens after I add a little time!

Tomato Wine: Fermentation Complete

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It looked like fermentation was winding down, so I drew a sample for testing. The sample had some dissolved CO2 in it, and that can skew my tests in two ways. It can give rise to carbonic acid, which will push the titratable acidity (TA) higher. It can also make it look like there is more sugar in the sample than there really is. As the CO2 comes out of solution, in the form of bubbles, it physically pushes upward on the hydrometer which leads to a higher specific gravity (SG) reading.

SG: 1.000, pH 3.03, TA: 10 g/L

The TA went from 6.5 to 10 g/L in six days, which is a much bigger jump than I was expecting. Did the carbonic acid push it up that much? Or did I just botch the test? Either way, the thing to do is rack and set it aside for a while. When I come back to retest, the CO2 will have bled off and I’ll have better results.

Tomato Wine Recipe

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I sowed seeds that sprouted into seedlings. I transplanted the seedlings to beds. I fussed over the tomato plants. I planned. I harvested. Now, at last, I’m finally making tomato wine!

Ingredients

Juice from 18 lb (8.2 kg) tomatoes – about 1.67 gallons (6.3 liters)
4.84 lb (2.2 kg) sugar
2.5 quarts (2.4 liters) water
8 tsp (40 g) tartaric acid
2 tsp (10 g) diammonium phosphate
1 tsp (2.3 g) pectic enzyme
sulfite to 50 ppm (equivalent to two campden tablets)
premier cuvee yeast

Overview

Make a yeast starter and set it aside to grow. Juice the tomatoes and pour it into the fermenter. Dissolve the sugar in the water, boil, cool, and add to fermenter. Add sulfite, pectic enzyme, diammonium phosphate, and tartaric acid. Pitch the yeast starter when it is active.

Adjusting the sugar

I measured the pressed juice at:

Specific Gravity (SG): 1.024, pH: 4.23, Titratable Acidity (TA): 4 g/L

Based on those measurements, I decided to add 4.6 liters of SG 1.180 sugar syrup to the tomato juice. That’s 2.2 kg of sugar dissolved in 2.4 liters of water, and it ought to leave me with almost 11 liters of SG 1.090 juice. To determine how much sugar syrup to add in your own recipe, you can use this formula:

x = ( V * (TG – SG) ) / (1.180 – TG)

where x is the amount of sugar water, in liters, to add
V is the volume of must, in liters (6.3, in my case)
TG is your specific gravity target (1.090)
SG is the current specific gravity of your must (1.024)

The 1.180 is the SG of the sugar syrup (I was running out of variable names!)

Adjusting the acid

Once I adjusted the sugar, I knew what the final volume of the must was going to be, about 11 liters. Dry white wine musts are normally between 7 – 9 g/L TA, but I decided to aim a little low at 6 g/L. I wanted to add some acid to get the pH down, but not down so much that it would inhibit fermentation. It’s easy to add more later, and I expected to do just that. At any rate, I already had about 25 g (6.3 liters of juice at 4 g/L), and I was targeting 66 g (11 liters of must at 6 g/L), so I needed to add about 41 g. After the additions, I measured again:

SG: 1.104, pH: 3.02, TA: 6.5 g/L

My actual sugar and acid levels came out a little higher than I predicted, probably because my weight and volume measurements are imprecise – close enough. Now I’ve got a little under three gallons of sweet acidic tomato juice. I don’t know what tomato wine is going to taste like, but this juice is really odd. There is a strong flavor of tomato, which I like but is completely out of place in such a sweet juice. I hope the yeast like it, because I just pitched the starter.

Update 2/28/2008: Too much acid!

After fermentation, I measured the TA at 9-10 g/L. An error in my measurements might explain the apparent jump. I took two measurements just before pitching the yeast, however, and they were consistent with each other. I took two more measurements after it had fermented out, and they were both showed an increase of 2.5-3.5 g/L. I know that some acid forms during fermentation, but this much? I’m not sure what happened here, but I think the lesson is to wait until your wine is fermented out before you adjust your acid.

Tomato Wine: Defrosted, Crushed, and Pressed

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Collecting Free Run Tomato Juice


I started with about 18 lb (8.2 kg) of frozen cherry tomatoes that came up to the 4-gallon (15 liter) mark of the bucket. After they thawed, I lightly crushed them with a long spoon. That left me with about 2.25 gallons of must, which I loaded into my three-bucket press. A few hours later, I had 1.67 gallons (6.3 liters) of juice. My initial measurements were:

Specific Gravity (SG): 1.024, pH: 4.23, Titratable Acidity (TA): 4 g/L

That ain’t grape juice

Because it will change the volume significantly, it’s best to adjust the sugar first. And it will be a big adjustment. A wine with 12% alcohol starts with juice at an SG around 1.090. Dissolving sugar in boiling water is a great way to sanitize it and make sure it mixes well with the juice. I’ll be adding so much I’m going to concentrated it to an SG of 1.180. That’s close to one part sugar and one part water. Any more sugar and I might have trouble dissolving it.

How much syrup? How much acid?

Ok, if you’ve got 6.3 liters of juice with an SG of 1.024, adding 4.6 liters SG 1.180 syrup should yield almost 11 liters of SG 1.090 juice. That initial 6.3 liters of juice had 4 g/L, about 25 g, of acid. To get 6 g/L in our final 11 liters of juice, we need to add about 40 g. Sometimes pressing takes longer than you think. Sometimes schedules get out of whack. By the time I had my estimates for sugar and acid additions, it was past midnight. I decided to add the acid right away, as that would push down the pH and help protect the juice from spoilage, and go to bed. We’re nearly there, and tomorrow, I’ll pull this all together into a recipe for tomato wine!

Defrosting Tomatoes

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Four gallons (15 liters) of frozen Gold Nugget tomatoes


I finally pulled the 18 lb (8+ kg) of tomatoes out of the freezer. I’ll be making a white wine from them, so once they defrost I’ll press them into juice. Then I can see what I’ve got in terms of sugar and acid, make adjustments, and start fermenting! I say this every season, but I don’t know why I waited so long. While I’m growing and harvesting my tomatoes (and rhubarb and grapes) I can’t wait to make wine from them. Then I get busy. Well, at least I’m starting my 2007 vintage in 2007.

Commercial Cranberry Wine

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I just found out that a commercial winery in Washington made a cranberry wine. They were faced with the same high acidity that I discussed a few days ago, and we both used a similar approach to deal with it. They blended with Chardonnay (20% cranberry and 80% Chardonnay), while I “blended” with water (25% cranberry and 75% water). I considered blending with another fruit, but I want my first wine to be just cranberry. The water, which contributes virtually no acidity, allows me to squeeze in a little more cranberry, and I feel a bit better calling the result “cranberry wine.” Once I get that down and find out what cranberry wine tastes like, I can try different blends by substituting other fruit for the water.

Cranberry Wine From Frozen Concentrate?

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I noticed some cranberry juice concentrate on sale the other day, and since I’m thinking about making cranberry wine I bought some. Can you make wine from cranberry juice concentrate? Yes, but “cranberry wine” might not be the best way to describe it. Most cranberry juice products are cocktails that contain cranberry juice. This frozen concentrate, for example, has more apple juice than cranberry juice.


Cranberry Juice Concentrate


What, you thought the “Cranberry” and “100% Juice” on the label meant that it was 100% cranberry juice? Silly you. The first ingredient is apple juice concentrate, followed by water, then cranberry juice concentrate. We’re not quite done. Next comes grape juice concentrate, black currant juice concentrate, and aronia berry juice concentrate. Aronia? It’s deciduous shrub, sometimes called black chokeberry that’s popular in Siberia. Really! Anyway, there’s still a few things in this “cranberry juice:” natural flavors, citric acid, and ascorbic acid.

I don’t want to knock this product. A blend of juices like that sounds promising, and might make a nice wine. In fact, I will make wine from it. Any ideas on what I should call the wine? “Apple Cranberry Grape Black-Currant Aroia wine” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue …