What To Do In The Off Season? Part 2

Ok with the first batch under our belts, we wanted to make a larger batch of from scratch wine.

Again this is following hours of internet research to find a recipe that would be good for beginners.

I found lots of information pointing to Jack Keller, a winemaker from Pleasanton, Texas, just south of San Antone. Wine making is his passion and for years he has been making wine from just about anything both fermentable and nontoxic. He has won many awards with his recipes.

We decided that we would like Strawberry wine and with them being out of season we opted for using frozen ones and Jack has a great recipe for that.

Frozen Strawberry Wine

• 3 lbs. frozen strawberries
• 1 11-oz. can Welch's 100% White Grape Juice Frozen Concentrate
• 1 lb 14 oz. light brown sugar
• 2 tsp. citric acid
• 1/4 tsp. grape tannin
• water to make 1 gallon
• 1 tsp. yeast nutrient
• 1 sachet Red Star Côte des Blancs wine yeast

This makes 1 gallon so we tripled it all but the yeast and started our 3 gallon batch.

Long story short we had it put together and ready to ferment Sunday afternoon after we completed the 1 gallon red wine.



This is what it looked like in the fermenting bucket. The strawberries where divided up into 3 sanitized new panty hose socks. (To cheap to spring for a mesh fermenting bag & at $.33 a pair for panty hose why would you!)

Mal took this picture and also got to use it in her photo class at school under the heading of Scary Halloween photos. She had a lot of fun in class letting class mates guess what nasty things where floating in that bucket of blood colored juice!

Now other than checking on them daily to stir the strawberry and check specific gravity to see when they are done fermenting, we just have to wait and stare at them! Patience and time are very critical in wine making. The red grape wine from the kit will be ready to drink as early as 7 weeks or so. The strawberry from scratch will be best after 6 months or so. Can't wait!



On the 7th day we removed the bags of fruit and let the juice drain back into the bucket.

Then we racked (transfer with hose) the wine from the bucket to a 3 gallon glass carboy, leaving as much of the sediment in the bottom of the bucket as we could.



Now the strawberry is ready to sit for 45 days in the carboy to allow the dead yeast to settle to the bottom and the wine will begin to clear up.

Gonna be a long winter, I will probably start brewing something else real soon! This is very addictive!

What To Do In The Off Season?

Well with the racing season winding down I needed to find something to occupy my free time.

I decided to do something I have been wanting to do for quite some time, Home Made Wine!

As anyone who knows me will could imagine, I did what I always do when I want to learn something new, I spend thousands of hours on the internet researching it! I spend way to much time here in front of this electric glow so why not use it wisely?

I spent a few months gathering up some basic equipment and then went for it!

Sunday we made a family project out of turning our kitchen into a make shift chemistry lab, Mal said it looked more like a meth lab... (joking of course!) We had fun with it and made a couple of batches to get us started.

The first one was a WonderWine kit I picked up off Ebay for $8. I figured not much of an investment if it goes bad! It was a small package including powdered grape juice, yeast and a clearing agent. I had know idea how long this kit sat around so I threw away the included yeast and used a new Lalvin wine yeast I had picked up. I also added a tsp of yeast nutrient to help it out. We mixed the kit in a big bowl with the amount of sugar listed to make a semi-sweet red.
Poured it into a 1 gallon glass jug and installed a bung with an airlock. (You can imagine the fun we had talking about sticking a bung plug into the bottles bung hole, Yes these are wine making terms and we do act like little kids sometimes!)

The wine started to bubble right away and the airlock bubbled off the unneeded gasses. Mal wanted to know how the yeast worked and in my most technical voice I told her that the yeast eats the sugar and poops out the booze! (Not real wine making terms!)



I will post more on this and info on the second batch latter!