Category Archives: Tasting

Have It Your Way

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One of the things I enjoy about being a wine maker is out of the box wine making. For example, most Riesling is sweet, and even “dry” Riesling often has residual sugar. It’s an acidic grape, and winemakers will tell you that they add just enough sugar to balance that acidity. The idea is to soften the acidity while leaving the wine “tasting dry.” This can improve some acidic wines, and I intend to do something like that with my cherry wine.

Could there be a Riesling that isn’t sweet? What would that be like? I boldly decided to find out. While processing the Riesling, I was determined to not cover it’s taste with a lot of sugar. I even had a tasting party when the wine was young. The idea was that my guests would sample four bottles of the Riesling with varying amount of sugar and comment on the sugar-acid balance. We had a blast and I appreciated the input but even then I went my own way.

I bottled the Riesling dry, with no residual sugar, and last weekend I put my hard work to the test. We had some friends, Ralph and Ruth, over for dinner. I served up my Sauvignon Blanc and the Riesling. I’m always interested to hear what people think of my wines but I was especially interested to hear what they thought of the Riesling. They liked it. In fact Ruth admitted she ordinarily doesn’t drink Riesling, “because I don’t like sweet wines.”

This is so common that it can be hard to find a truly dry Riesling. One nice thing about making my own wine is that I can make it just the way I like it. I made it dry and I’m glad I did.

Update 4/19/2010 – Taste blind to judge your creations objectively

The hope and excitement that go into these experiments create a lot of mental baggage, which can make it difficult to see past your own preconceptions and taste the wine objectively. But objective feedback is critical to knowing if you’re on the right track or you need to make adjustments in your wine making. Tasting blind is a great solution, and here’s a quick and easy way to do your own blind tasting at home.



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.



Don’t Judge A Wine By It’s Color

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My sister only drinks red wine, and when she came to dinner the other night she brought a lovely bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir. It was really nice of her, and we all enjoyed it, but I wonder if a tiny part of her reason was to avoid being “stuck” with the whites I wanted to showcase.

I opened a bottle of mead that I made in the style of a dry white wine, and for some it was the first mead they had ever tried. I can’t really describe what mead tastes like. I wondered about that for a long time, then I finally decided to make some and find out.

Next came a rhubarb wine. I make this every year from rhubarb that I grow in my backyard. It was dry, like the mead, and had the lightest color of the three. Rhubarb was one of the first “country wines” I ever tried, and it opened my eyes to a whole new world beyond grapes.

My 2005 Riesling rounded out my trio – very dry and acidic, but balanced, and it had a great flavor. She asked for a bottle to take home with her, “I didn’t think I liked white wine, but I like Erroll’s white wine.”

I love red wine, but I think a lot of people are missing just how great white wine can be!

2005 Riesling

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Oz Clark, in his Grapes and Wines, called Riesling the wine critic’s favorite grape. I can see why. I just tried some of my 2005, and it’s marvelous.

A wineglass, half filled with Riesling, and a full, corked bottle of 2005 Riesling.


I made it dry (the final gravity was 0.990, one of the lowest readings for any wine I’ve made) but even 9 g/L of acidity didn’t unbalance the wine. To make it, I bought grapes from my local homebrew shop. I was able to use their equipment as part of the purchase, so I took home two partially filled carboys of juice. I added pectic enzyme and pitched the yeast, Red Star Premier Cuvee. Other than that, all I added was time. Not many people think to age white wines, but some do very well, and Riesling is the queen of aged whites. These Washington grown grapes, available at retail, probably aren’t the sort to make a wine that will improve over decades, but I look forward to tasting it as it ages over the next year or two.

Bottling Day

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I bottled four 1-gallon batches, three meads and an apple wine, yesterday.

2005 Apple Wine

I harvested 13 lb of Liberty apples from my backyard, in 2005, and turned them, along with a gallon of Trader Joe’s Gravestein apple juice, into a batch of apple wine. It’s got a rich golden color, a wonderful aroma, and it’s very smooth with just a hint of apple.

My first mead – with genuine Costco honey!

The meads were each a little different. One of them was part of the first batch of mead I ever made. The fermentation stuck at SG = 1.030, and it was three years old in February 2006. I decided to split the batch, stabilizing and bottling half as a sweet mead, and oaking the other half. It began to ferment again after I racked it onto the oak chips, and by the time I bottled yesterday it was a dry oaked mead that’ll be five years old in February. Even though it was dry (SG = 1.000), it had a lively sweet taste to it, possibly because of the high alcohol content (about 14%, by volume). The aroma was wonderful and powerful.

A mead like Brother Adam used to make

I made the next mead the way Brother Adam made his. He was a monk at Buckfast Abbey, famous for keeping (and breeding) honeybees and making mead. His method was to make it in large batches and age in oak casks for 7 years. He used soft (distilled or rain) water and a mild honey, like clover. He aimed for a lower alcohol content than most – about 8 or 9% ABV – and shunned most additives, though he often used cream of tartar and, for dry meads, “a little” citric acid. He boiled the honey-water mixture for 1-2 minutes and fermented cool (65F – 70F) with a pure yeast culture like Madeira or Malaga.

I didn’t have an oak cask handy (or the honey to fill it, or the space to store it, or …), and I have seen the inside of a rain barrel. So I used tap water and fermented in a plastic pail. I decided that 0.5 tsp = “a little” citric acid for a 1-gallon batch, and I added 1 tsp of cream of tartar. 2 lb of clover honey brought the SG to 1.074, which at about 10% potential alcohol, was slightly higher than the 8-9% I was aiming for. I boiled the honey-water mixture for about a minute and fermented cool with Côte des Blances yeast (I had never heard of Madeira or Malaga). So far, it has aged for a little over 3 years, including 9 months on oak chips. I don’t think I’ll be able to wait seven years!

I thought I could smell, not taste, the oak in this one. It was smooth and I enjoyed it.

A wine-like mead

The last batch of mead was the most wine-like of the lot, and the only one I didn’t oak. I started this one in March 2004 with clover honey from The Honey Store. I added tannin and tartaric acid to make a dry mead with 12% alcohol. The aroma was distinct from the other two; I would say “fresher” and I thought there was a hint of sweetness in the taste.

So now I’ve got twenty bottles of four different wines and meads to enjoy. Time to stop writing and start sipping!