A 9-Liter Measuring Cup

Making Wine: What I Learned From An Economist

Greg Mankiw teaches economics at Harvard University, and I read his blog regularly. He recently spotlighted part of a Boston Globe Article on the lighter side of science. He zeroed in on the work of another economist – ok, I know what you’re thinking, “as exciting as one economist talking about another sounds, what the heck has it got to do with winemaking?” I’m getting to that. The other economist is named Dan Ariely, and he experimented on volunteers to find out how marketing impacts a drug’s effectiveness. He administered an electric shock to the volunteers then gave them the same placebo. Some of them were told it was an expensive new painkiller, and others that it was cheap.

Those who got the pricey fake medicine reported a bigger reduction in pain than those whith the cheaper fake.

What’s going on here? The same thing that was going on when California Institute of Technology scientists looked into the effect of price on a wine’s perceived quality. It all reminds me of a Candid Camera piece that had grocery store customers sample a new wine, and they showed a guy raving about the wine and how much he’d be willing to pay for a bottle. Then they cut to tape of another fellow who said, “it tastes like prune juice.” There was a good reason for that – it was prune juice.

Confidence is sexy

There’s more to this than having a good chuckle and nervously reassuring ourselves that it could never happen to us. The thing to take away from this is that if you make a good wine (or mead or beer or liqueur), treat it like a good wine. Dress it up in a proper wine bottle and a nice looking label. Pour it into wine glasses and serve it as though it were something special – because it is! You don’t have to be dishonest, just be proud of what you have done and let it show.

Update 4/19/2010 – How to tell if an expensive wine is worth it

Clearly, our tasting experience can strongly influenced by our expectations and preconceived ideas. Tasting blind gets us around that problem by removing the mental baggage we bring to each tasting. We can’t prejudge a wine if we don’t know which wine it is, can we? Learn how to run an easy blind tasting at home so you can sniff out bargains that are worth more than they cost and to tell which pricey wines are worth the money.

Honey Prices: A bull market in this liquid asset

2 Replies

If you make a lot of mead, you buy a lot of honey. I like to buy in bulk and keep an eye on prices – there’s been a lot to keep an eye on in the seven months since my last price report. The stable prices in March have given way to much more expensive honey in October. Price increases ranged from 6.5%, on Miller’s clover, to 38.9% on Dutch Gold wildflower. Have a look at the table below for the details on how various honey prices have changed.

Source and Type	Price March 2008 ($/lb)	Recent Price	% Change
Costco Clover	1.47	1.57	+6.8
Sam’s Club Clover	1.53	1.86	+21.6
Miller’s Honey Clover	1.55	1.65	+6.5
Miller’s Honey Wildflower	1.15	1.35	+17.4
Dutch Gold Clover	1.30	1.71	+31.5
Dutch Gold Wildflower	1.26	1.75	+38.9

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Clover honey at Costco is still a better deal than at Sam’s or at the packers. Its not just cheaper than the others, but it comes in smaller 6 lb jugs plus you can avoid shipping charges by picking it up locally. The lowest unit price is still Miller’s wildflower – a high quality honey at a great price.

What about other varietals?

I keep track of the prices I do because they’re widely available in the United States. Almost every honey vendor sells clover honey, and wildflower is almost always the cheapest honey a vendor offers. Keeping track of these prices lets me compare like with like and is the best way to spot trends.

Improved price information

I haven’t made much headway in tracking honey prices overseas. I just don’t have enough local knowledge to pick benchmarks (I think acacia honey might be the one to follow in Europe, but I’m not sure) or suitable vendors (Tesco in the UK?). I do plan on recording prices as of Jan 1, 2009 to better compare with the USDA’s “all honey” price, and I’m thinking of adding other sweeteners like malt extract, sugar, and maple syrup.

Apple Mead

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I’ll often make a fruit mead the way you would make a second wine. I made a cherry mead like that last year, for example, and I’ll make an apple mead the same way. I saved the pulp from apples I juiced to make wine, put it in a ziplock bag, and froze it. That’s what I’ll use to make this mead.

Ingredients

Apple pulp
1 liter (about a quart) honey
4 liters (about a gallon) water
0.25 tsp tannin
1 tsp diammonium phosphate (DAP, a yeast nutrient)
2 tsp pectic enzyme
sulfite
yeast from fermenting apple wine

Procedure

Mixing one part honey to four parts water will, depending on measurement accuracy and water content of the honey, yield a 1.085 specific gravity must. In goes the tannin, DAP, and sulfite (all dissolved in a little water first). Then, straight from the freezer, add the pulp and let it defrost overnight. By morning the pulp had thawed out, and I added the pectic enzyme. I stirred it all up and it had the consistency of runny apple sauce. I added the yeast, in the form of fermenting apple wine, in the evening.

No specific gravity reading?

The pulp will contribute to the sugar and acidity of the must, but that sugar and acid is bound up in the solids. That makes it very difficult to measure, so I’m making up a honey-water mixture that would ferment to 11-12% alcohol by itself. The sugar in the pulp will increase that by a small amount, and I’ll just call it a 12+% alcohol level.

No titratable acidity reading either

Once the mead has fermented out, all the acid contributed by the pulp will be in the mead. That’s when I’ll take my measurement. I’ll have the same problem measuring the acidity here as I would in any mead, but I’ll take that into account as best I can and make the adjustment then.

In the meantime, I get to watch my little yeasties turn some applesauce-like goo into apple mead!

Update 10/5/08 – I strained out the pulp using the same three-bucket press that I used on my cherry mead. I didn’t use the third bucket, the one filled with water that does the actual pressing, here because there isn’t enough pulp for the pressing action to be effective. Instead, I used the bottom half of the press like a giant cheesecloth-lined colander with a catch bucket. I now have a little over 1.25 gallons of fermenting mead under an airlock.

Apple Wine 2008

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Apple Harvest on 9/23/2008

Normally I use my own apples to supplement store bought juice in my apple wine, but this year I had more fruit available so I decided to make it exclusively from my own apples. I followed the same procedure as last year.

Ingredients

12.8 lb (5.8 kg) of roxbury russet, ashmead kernel, and liberty apples
0.25 tsp tannin
0.5 tsp Diammonium Phosphate (DAP, a yeast nutrient)
sulfite
1 tsp pectic enzyme
Lavlin 71-B yeast from starter

Chop & juice the apples

I don’t have enough apples to justify an apple grinder, but I’ve got too many for a juicer. With no alternative, I used the juicer anyway, and it did the job. One downside to using the juicer is that you have to chop the apples to make them fit in the chute. Another is that you have to stop and clean out the filter frequently. The Lady of the House helped, and that made it a lot easier; she chopped, and I operated the juicer. In the end, the 12.8 lb of apples yielded 2.5 quarts (2.4 liters) of cloudy brown juice. I added sulfite at the beginning and pectic enzyme at the end.

Adjust the sugar and acid

Suspended solids made the juice brown and cloudy. They would also throw off the specific gravity (SG) reading by making the liquid more dense, so I ran about a cup (250 ml) through a coffee filter to get clear golden juice (this took almost an hour, and involved changing the coffee filter halfway through). In the meantime, I was calibrating my pH meter and setting up my new acid test contraption (I really need a clever name for that). I quickly measured the filtered sample:

SG: 1.046, pH: 3.08, titratable acidity (TA): 5.9 g/L, as tartaric

I’m using honey, like I did last year, to bring the SG up to 1.090. This equation determines how much honey to add:

VH = VI * (SGT – SGI) / (SGH – SGT)

VH is the volume of honey – that’s what I’m trying to find
VI is the initial volume – 2.4 liters
SGT is the target SG – 1.090
SGI is the initial SG – 1.046
SGH is the SG of honey – 1.417 (at 18% water)

so …

VH = 2.4L * (1.090 – 1.046) / (1.417 – 1.090) = 0.3L

Measuring Honey To measure out 0.3L (300 ml) of crystalized honey, I added 200 ml of apple juice to a measuring cup. Then I added scoops of honey until the liquid reached the 500 ml line. After some stirring and dissolving, I added it to the rest of the juice then measured another filtered sample – SG 1.090 on the nose!

With the TA at about 6 g/L, I decided not to adjust the acid until it ferments out.

Turn it over to the yeast

After that it was as simple as adding the DAP and tannin, dissolving them in a little water first, then pitching the yeast. It’s been several months since I made wine, and its good to be back. I’m excited to see how my first “estate bottled” apple wine turns out, and I’ll be sure to post updates.

Apple wine from store-bought juice: less work, easy cleanup

Would you rather have someone else juice the apples? Someone with efficient, state-of-the-art equipment? And while he was at it, clean up afterwards? Buy store-bought juice. Then use the recipe I made for Leslie to make apple wine with less work and easy cleanup!

My Dad’s Big Red Wine

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My dad has been keeping this big old bottle of wine that none of us knows much about. According to the label it’s a 1978 red table wine from Piedmont, Italy. It also says, “Ribezzo Barbera D’Asti.” It’s a 12-liter bottle, and I was afraid the wine was past its prime. If so, it wasn’t getting any better and the thing to do was re-bottle it. Then we’d know what shape the wine was in and we’d have it in normal bottles to drink as we liked. The first thing I had to do was uncork it.

So how do you uncork a 12-liter wine bottle? A lever action corkscrew is no good because it’s too small for the cork to pass through. I tried a waiters corkscrew. It looked a little small in comparison, but I got it in as far as I could and started pulling. I thought it was working at first, as the cork seemed like it was coming out easily. I soon discovered that the 30-year old cork had split horizontally, so I pulled out the top half of the cork but the bottom half remained stubbornly in place.

Broken Cork

I was hoping to get the cork out whole and clean, but prepared to deal with cork or pieces of cork in the wine. I put plan B into action by gently pushing the cork down until it fell into the wine. So far, so good, but now we’re at the embarrassing part of the story. I began to siphon the wine into a bottling bucket, and all was going well. I made sure to keep the end of my racking cane off the bottom so as not to pick up sediment. As the wine level in the bottle went down, I lowered the racking cane until … it wouldn’t go down any more. That’s when I realized that this bottle was taller than my carboys and the racking cane wasn’t big enough to reach all the way to the bottom.

Too Small!

Lesson learned. Next time I have to deal with an unusual size, I’ll double check my equipment and make sure it fits the container. There I was with most of the wine in the bottling bucket, but no way to siphon the rest. I gritted my teeth and poured the remaining wine. From here on, it was pretty familiar. I moved the bottling bucket onto a counter, and filled 14 bottles while the Lady of the House corked them. Now we’ve got some tasting to do!

Update I took a photo of Big Red before re-bottling.

Kirkland Signature Sauvignon Blanc

Titratable Acidity: A Better Way!

15 Replies

So what’s that contraption pictured above? I wrote about it back in February, and I think it’s a better way to measure titratable acidity (TA). It works by adding a measured sample of wine to sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). The baking soda reacts with acid in the sample, giving off carbon dioxide gas (CO2) in direct proportion to the amount of acid. This device measures that CO2, and you can use that to determine the TA of the sample.

Pinot and Me

Commercial Cherry Wine

4 Replies

I’m still trying to get the hang of cherry wine, but while I tinker and tweak I might be able to buy some from the Ten Spoon Vineyard. This Montana winery uses Lambert cherries from Flathead Lake to make a dry red wine. I always get excited when I find the pros making “fruit wine.” I got some great advice on making rhubarb wine from the Lynfred Winery, and I’m hoping the people at Ten Spoon will share some tidbits.

I haven’t looked in on last year’s cherry wine since July, when I noticed a problem with the acidity. The total acidity (TA) was too high, which I would ordinarily address by neutralizing some of it. The pH was high as well, and that made my job tougher. If I went ahead and neutralized some of the acid to get the TA down, I would also be raising the already-too-high pH. So my thought was to leave the acid alone and balance it with sugar. Maybe I can get some advice on this – and find out if any of the shops around here carry Ten Spoon’s cherry wine!

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