Jack Keller lives with his wife Donna in Pleasanton, Texas, just south of San Antone. Winemaking is his passion and for years he has been making wine from just about anything both fermentable and nontoxic.
Jack has developed scores of recipes and tends to gravitate to the exotic or unusual, having once won first place with jalapeno wine, second place with sandburr wine, and third with Bermuda grass clippings wine.
Jack was twice the President of the San Antonio Regional Wine Guild, is a certified home wine judge, frequent contributor to WineMaker Magazine, creator and author of The Winemaking Home Page and of Jack Keller's WineBlog, the first wine blog on the internet, ever. He grows a few grapes, still works for a living, and is slowly writing a book on -- what else? -- winemaking.
Some Other Wine Blogs
There are hundreds of wine blogs. According to Alder Yarrow (see below), none have been around as long as
Jack Keller's WineBlog, but 99% of these newcomers are for wine consumers, not winemakers. They have
anointed themselves the official "wine blogosphere." You can count on both hands those of us bloggers
dedicated to actually making the stuff they write about, and yet our blogs are largely ignored by this elite.
Still, they exist and are important. There are some who write for the buyer / consumer but still occasionally
talk about the making of wine, even if they usually are talking about making it in 125,000-liter stainless
steel tanks. Or they might talk about grape varieties, harvests in general, the cork-screwcap debate,
stemware, or other subjects I think you might find interesting. They're worth reading even if you aren't
interested in their tasting notes. Then again, that just might be your cup od tea. Here are a few of them I
like, listed in a loose alphabetical order (by blogger):
Today I was reminded of two things. The first was the following quote from the opening paragraph of my
last WineBlog entry: "Opinions matter, and whether we agree with an opinion or not each person has the
right to express one. That is but one of the things our veterans served to guarantee. Censorship is not the
expression of opinion, but rather the silencing of opinion. We should resist any and all attempts to silence
voices we disagree with lest our own voices fall out of favor and become those they with power would silence."
The second thing I was reminded of is my entry of October 2nd, 2007 that began: "As I stated in my August 31st
WineBlog, this is not a political site. I will not turn it into one and will not allow petty intolerance
to hijack the site and turn it into one. I have therefore had to insist that several recent entries to my
guestbook be removed due to their inflammatory nature. I left the original protest entry in the guestbook, but
those that stooped to name-calling were removed, whether they supported me or the protestor." The writer then
asked, "So is it okay to censor your own site but not okay for others to censor their own?"
First, I think there is a huge difference between removing hateful name-calling and removing a tribute to
veterans. If someone cannot see this, then that person has a problem. Second, the entry in Ocober 2007 went
on to say, "Before someone screams 'censorship,' consider for a moment that this is a private website with
public viewing privileges granted by the site's owner -- me. If anyone wants to spend their own time and money
and create their own site and rant against me, please feel free to do so." I think that is pretty clear.
Third, the forum that removed the link to the tribute to veterans is also privately owned, but the knowledge
and opinions of the owner are not at all what that site is about whereas they are what my site is about. The
forum survives on the comments of many members, while my guestbook is but a minor part of my site and receives
very little readership. The forum has rules and guidelines for forum participation. One of those rules is:
"...we will not tolerate rudeness, insulting posts, personal attacks, derogatory comments, racial or religious
slurs or purposeless inflammatory posts. Be respectful of others at all times." That pretty much agrees with
my own sense of civil communication. Another rule of the forum is: "Due to their volatile nature, discussion
involving political, religious, or other sensitive topics not related to wine making will be locked and/or
deleted. This is done to keep tempers in check and everyone civil. The moderator team will not delete a topic
without discussion among themselves." The owner of that forum contacted me to ask if it was his forum I spoke
of because he had no knowledge of such a post being deleted. I can only infer that one of his moderators acted
outside his stated rules -- meaning the owner did not censor his own site -- but that isn't my point. My
point is that a tribute to those who served to guarantee one the freedom to be a forum moderator should not be
deleted because the moderator doesn't appreciate their service.
My deletion of intentionally inflammatory language is not at all analogous to what I protested. If you think
it is, you need to take a semester of Logic. Now, I very much wish to leave this topic and move on to
winemaking....
Somewhere I read or heard that the Campden in Campden tablets is always capitalized because it represents
the name of the chemist who formulated them. I believe I repeated that claim in writing, but cannot find
where I did so. Several months ago I read an alternative claim to the origin of the name and have been trying
to confirm it ever since. I have finally received some authoritative information.
Last week I received a communiqué with three attachments from the librarian of Campden Brewing Research
International, an affiliate of Campden & Chorleywood Food Research Association, Chipping Campden,
Gloucestershire, UK. Campden tablets began as Campden Fruit Preserving Solution somewhere around 1921-1923.
Initial work was administered by the Department of Agriculture and Horticulture, University of Bristol, at the
Fruit and Vegetable Preservation Research Station at Chipping Campden. The goal was a method to preserve fresh
fruit as an alternative to the more usual method of heat treatment. Campden Solution was the answer and was
later made more widely available and therefore more widely known in the form of Campden tablets, which delivered
a consistent and predictable dose of sodium or potassium metabisulfite.
The authors of the Campden Fruit Preserving Solution pamphlet do, of course, give precise instructions for
its use, including cooking the preserved fruit before use. Thus, the normal use would be in jams , pies or
fruit-filled pastries. As many winemakers already know, "The fruit will lose colour, but this will in a large
measure return during the cooking process." The Campden Solution preserves the whole fruit. "The only fruits
which have so far yielded less satisfactory results have been gooseberries and black and red currants."
I am still seeking information on the inert binding material that composes most of the bulk of a Campden
tablet and will report on that when discovered.
An astute reader noticed that somewhere I mentioned adding potassium sorbate as a contributor to wine's
organic stability -- the other contributor being potassium metabisulfite -- and then mentioned that the active
inhibitor in the first compound is sorbic acid. He than asked if it would be better to simply add sorbic acid
directly and forget the potassium sorbate. The simple answer is no; use the potassium sorbate because it is
much more soluble in wine than is sorbic acid, and yet once in solution it is nearly 74% sorbic acid. But, as
in most things having to do with wine, the whole picture is far more complicated than that...and far more
interesting, too.
Sorbic acid was isolated in 1859, but its antimicrobial and antifungal properties were not recognized until
the 1940s. Soon thereafter it was accepted in the food industry as a preservative. France allowed it in wine
in the 1950s, but it was not until 1970 that it and its potassium salt were allowed in wine in the United
States. The maximum amount allowed by regulation far exceeds any amount actually required by cultured wine
yeasts, but it has been established that it has a selective efficacy against wild yeast species and strains.
In other words, if you permit a natural fermentation and wish to bottle a sweet wine, you will have to find
some method other than "K2 stabilization" (potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfite) to ensure your corks
do not pop or, worse, your bottles explode. In fairness, you may not have a problem, but then again....
Sorbic acid's antimicrobial efficacy increases in its undissociated form. It has a pKa of 4.75, meaning it
dissociates/undissociates 50% at pH 4.75; undissociation increases as the pH of the wine decreases. At pH
3.50 it is 95% undissociated and at pH 3.00 it is 98%. The efficacy also increases with increased ethanol.
According to Emile Peynaud (Knowing and Making Wine, English translation, 1984), the alcoholic content
is more important than the pH because wine will always be acidic enough to ensure adequate efficacy. He
recommends the dose of sorbic acid be based on the alcoholic content of clarified wine, with 150 mg/L in a 10%
alcohol by volume (abv) wine, 100 mg/L in 12% abv wine and 50 mg/L in 14% abv wine. While I am confident these
numbers are correct, I continue to use 1/2 teaspoon of potassium sorbate per gallon of wine regardless of pH
or abv. If I were making tens of thousands of gallons of wine per year, I have no doubt I would calculate a
more precise number and then add a fudge-factor for insurance.
The dose I use, in conjunction with an aseptic dose of potassium metabisulfite, will not produce off-odors.
I point this out because too much potassium sorbate can result in the formation of ethyl sorbate, which is
unpleasant. Also, the sulfite dose ensures that lactic acid bacteria cannot survive to contaminate the wine
with 2-ethoxyhexa-3,5 diene, which imparts a noticeable and offensive geranium odor.
It is also important to know that potassium sorbate's solubility declines with temperature. In other words,
if you are going to cold stabilize a wine, add the potassium sorbate to the wine before placing it in the
chiller. Because cold stabilization usually lasts at least two weeks, this accomplishes two things. First, it
gets the sorbic acid in the wine at least two weeks sooner than if added after cold stabilization. Second, the
potassium released from the sorbate salt can react with excess tartaric acid and precipitate out in the chiller
as potassium tartrate crystals.
Potassium sorbate can be purchased as a fine powder or in prilled form -- small, elongated granules. Only
once in 40 years have I encountered the powdered form, and that was when I ordered it from a scientific supply
catalog. I believe the only kind you will purchase from homebrew shops is the prilled form, and it dissolves
more easily if reduced back to a powder. To accomplish this, I measure the total amount I need to add and
place it and the appropriate amount of potassium metabisulfite I need in a small mortar and then use a pestle
to easily grind it into a powder. Just lay the pestle on the granules and roll the tip over them -- do not
strike them with an up-and-down striking action or you will scatter them all over your work area. I then add
2-3 tablespoons of hot water from the tap to the mortar and stir until the powder is dissolved. I then wipe
a glass rod with a folded paper towel saturated with 10% sulfite solution, insert the rod into the carboy, and
slowly stir while adding the K2 solution. The powder dissolves more easily than the prilled sorbate, the hot
tap water dissolves the powder more easily than cold water or wine would, and stirring while I add it to the
wine helps integrate it quickly before I place the carboy in the chiller.
Before I conclude the subject, I should at least offer you the formula for calculating how much potassium
sorbate to use should you decide to follow Peynard's assertion that alcohol is the prime determinate as to how
much one actually needs to add. It is up to you to measure the very precise numbers involved. Because
potassium sorbate contains about 74% sorbic acid (73.97% to be exact), we can build in a tiny insurance factor
by equating the desired amount of sorbic acid in milligrams per liter (mg/L) to that amount of potassium sorbate
x (times) 1.35. In other words, if we have a 12% wine and want to add 100 mg/L of sorbic acid (see above), we
would need 100 mg/L x 1.35 or 135 mg/L of potassium sorbate. For a gallon of wine, multiply 135 mg/L x 3.785 L
(1 gallon) and you will need 511 mg of potassium sorbate. That is slightly less than 1/4 teaspoon of potassium
sorbate, but because Peynaud dismisses pH as less significant I am not altogether sure this is enough. I will
continue to add my 1/2 teaspoon per gallon.
And that is probably more than you wanted to know about sorbic acid....
I have been criticized for my "outburst" against whatever forum moderator removed the link I mentioned in
my last posting. On the other hand, I have received more support than criticism. Thank you all for expressing
an opinion either way. Opinions matter, and whether we agree with an opinion or not each person has the right
to express one. That is but one of the things our veterans served to guarantee. Censorship is not the
expression of opinion, but rather the silencing of opinion. We should resist any and all attempts to silence
voices we disagree with lest our own voices fall out of favor and become those they with power would silence.
At the risk of sounding "political," I say, Be not afraid of voices heard in dissent for you can choose to
simply stop listening to them, but do be afraid if ever no dissent is heard, for then you will know the free
state you once enjoyed has ceased to exist.
In my Veterans' Day entry I mentioned much email about pumpkin wine. One of these conveyed a problem I did
not share with you, but it concerned a weak, sluggish or stuck fermentation. I wrote back recommending the
future use of a yeast starter solution for all the reasons I've listed so many times before, but foremost
among them being that you can quickly determine the viability of the yeast you are using. The winemaker then
replied that he was sure the yeast were viable as he had started several other successful fermentations using
yeast purchased at the same time. And so I replied again that it really would be smart in the future to get
in the habit of making a yeast starter solution for each batch of wine. It takes about 3 minutes to prepare
one and it accomplishes three things:
(1) You learn real fast if the yeast are viable or not;
(2) By adding a little must to the starter every few hours, you get the yeast conditioned to readily accept
the environment you are going to dump them into;
(3) You increase the size of the culture exponentially -- it doubles every two hours -- and so by the time
you are ready to add the yeast to the must you have a few hundred to a few thousand times as many yeast cells
as when you started and fermentation will kick in fast and furious.
One packet of yeast cells grows approximately like this:
Two winemakers have contacted me recently with complaints of the odor of burnt rubber in their wines. The
two contacts were very different. One knew nothing related to winemaking that would explain this except
perhaps contamination from the new bung. The second did a fine job of diagnosing the problem and analyzing the
probable causes. Indeed, his only questions were did he miss anything and can the wine be salvaged? The gulf
of difference in knowledge between the two is stark, but I do remember when I first smelled cooked cabbage in a
wine -- a symptom quite different from (but nonetheless related to) burnt rubber -- and I headed to the library
to see what I could find out about it.
The problem for both writers stems from sulfur. Sulfur can be both friend and foe. Sulfur dioxide and
metabisulfite protect our wine. When sulfur is reduced -- left to chemically react with other elements in the
absence of oxygen -- it can create volatile and often foul-smelling compounds ruinous to wine. Hydrogen sulfide
(H2S), which can exude the stench of rotten eggs, is often mentioned as the reduction
villain of sulfur, but it is but one of many and by no means the worse.
Let me share with you something I did not realize until a lab technician brought it to my attention one day.
"Where oxygen often creates a compound we desire," he began, "if you replace the oxygen with sulfur you get
something quite odorous. For example, water is H2O. Replace the oxygen with sulfur
and you have H2S or hydrogen sulfide. If you take methanol, which is CH
3OH, and replace the oxygen with sulfur, you get methyl mercaptan (also known as methanethiol) or
CH3SH. This is rank stuff and can smell like stagnant ditch water, rotten cabbage,
burnt rubber, garlic, or onion. It's intentionally added to propane and natural gas so you can smell them.
"Similarly, if you take ethanol -- C2H5OH -- and replace the
oxygen with sulfur you get ethyl mercaptan (also known as ethanethiol) or C2H5SH. Ethyl mercaptan can smell like burnt matches, burnt rubber, garlic or onion." He said
much more than this, but this is all I know I can cite accurately.
In truth, not all mercaptans are foul-smelling. Different ones convey smells like blackcurrant, roasted
coffee, passion fruit, gooseberry, and grapefruit.
In addition to hydrogen sulfide and the various mercaptans, there are also sulfides and disulfides. Like
mercaptans, these can contribute both desirable and ruinous aromas to wines. The odyssey of the formation
and evolution of the various mercaptans, sulfides and disulfides is far too complex (and boring) to examine
here, but there are many good, albeit long, discussions on the internet. I have referenced three in the links
following this entry (the first three) and another on the removal of H2S from wine.
We will revisit this subject and explore it further at a later time. But at the moment the hour is very
late and I need some sleep.
Ninety years ago today, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the guns fell silent
and ended The Great War, the War to End All Wars, World War I. The annual remembrance of this day was and
still is celebrated by the countries then involved as Armistice Dar, Remembrance Day, and the Day of Peace. In
1954 President Dwight David Eisenhower signed a law that changed the holiday in the United States from Armistice
Day to Veteran's Day in honor of all who served in the uniformed services of the nation. This holiday differs
from Memorial Day, which honors those who perished in the service of our country.
In the last few days I received many emails of tribute to the men and women honored by Veterans' Day. Some
bore internal expressions and some contained links to posted expressions, but all of the expressions themselves
were poignantly written. One I particularly like is posted on a website, linked to below, and was written by a
United States Marine Corps chaplain. The man who sent it to me also posted it on a winemaking forum I frequent.
I am extremely saddened that some insensitive, pea-brained, politically correct, non-patriotic moron of a
moderator removed it. How utterly despicable that anyone would exercise the freedoms that the veterans of this
nation served to guarantee by removing a link to honor those very men and women. The link so removed ended
with the oft-quoted verse:
"It is the soldier, not the reporter,
Who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet,
Who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer,
Who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier,
Who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protestor to burn the flag."
As far as I am concerned, that moderator burned the flag. While he or she possesses the right to do so, I
have the right to remove my link to that forum and will never again cite it until it posts an apology to all
U.S. veterans for the insult paid them by removing a link paying them honor. Having served 28 years in the Army
of my country, I have earned the right to do this. One may say the subject removed was too off-topic for the
forum, but I have been a member of that forum for nearly 6 years (I was the 6th member to join it) and I have
seen many off-topic posts in that particular sub-forum -- a sub-forum created for both on- and off-topic posts.
I will defend your right to insult all veterans, but I don't have to patronize you once you have done so. I
hope my friends there will understand.
RSS Feed
I am now providing an rss feed of the WineBlog's contents to those who wish to receive it. There are
two ways to do so. First, you can click on the link in the left-hand column, just before Jack's Winemaking
Links, that says "Subscribe to Jack Keller's WineBlog"; second, you can scroll down past the left-hand
description "Who is Jack Keller?" and enter your email address in the dialog box and then click "Subscribe." A
third way is to past http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/rss.xml into your rss reader according to it's own
instructions for adding a feed.
Because I just added this feature, I do not have any subscribers yet. Be the first....
Everyone seems to be making pumpkin wine these days and I always get questions for clarification on the
pumpkin wine recipe posted on my site. I clarified some issues a little over 3 years ago, but now and done so
again. The modified recipe and discussion follow. Just remember, you make this wine now to drink a year from
now. I don't want to get any emails four to six months from now saying it tastes bad.
This essentially is Leo Zanelli's recipe and he swears by it. The sugar is high and will produce either an
18% alcohol dry wine or a lower alcohol sweet wine, depending on what yeast you use. If you want the high
alcohol, use a high alcohol yeast such as Lalvin K1V-1116 (Montpellier) or Wyeast 3347 (Eau de Vie), both of
which can handle the extreme sugar. If you want moderate alcohol but sweet wine, use Red Star Côte des Blancs
for 13% alcohol with 5% residual sugar. For slightly less sweet, use Lalvin 71B-1122 (Narbonne), ICV-D47
(Côtes-du-Rhône), Lalvin Simi-White, or White Labs WLP730 Chardonnay White Wine for 14% alcohol and 4% residual
sugar, or Lalvin AMH (Assmanshausen), Lalvin BGY (Burgundy), Lalvin CY3079, Lalvin ICV-D80 (Côte Rôtie), or
White Labs WLP720 Sweet Mead/Wine for 15% alcohol and 3% residual sugar. Read the yeast descriptors on my site
for correct nutrient and temperature requirements for the strain you select. Begin this recipe in the morning
so you have time to complete the tasks without having to awaken in the middle of the night.
Pumpkin Wine
5 lbs grated pumpkin flesh
3-1/4 lbs finely granulated sugar
1 tsp pectic enzyme
1/2 oz citric acid
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1/4 tsp yeast energizer
1 finely crushed and dissolved Campden tablet
6-1/2 pts water
wine yeast (see above)
Grate the pumpkin flesh mechanically (recommended) or by hand and set aside. Do NOT place chunks in a blender
and attempt to chop them. Bring the water to a boil and stir in the sugar until dissolved. Remove from heat.
Place grated pumpkin flesh in primary and pour boiling water over pumpkin. Allow to cool to room temperature and
add finely crushed and dissolved Campden tablet. Cover primary and allow to sit 8-10 hours. Add pectic enzyme
and allow to sit overnight. Next morning add citric acid, yeast nutrient, energizer and activated yeast. Cover
primary and stir twice daily for three days, submerging "cap" as necessary to keep moist. Pour through a nylon
straining bag and let pumpkin drip drain. Transfer to secondary and fit airlock. If you did not recover a full
gallon of liquid, wait 5 days and top up as necessary. Rack after two weeks and again after additional 30 days,
topping up and refitting airlock each time. Set aside for 3 months and then rack, stabilize, sweeten if desired
(unlikely you will need to but...), wait 3 weeks for dead yeast to fall out, and rack into bottles. Set aside
to drink next year at Thanksgiving or Christmas. [Adapted from Leo Zanelli's Home Winemaking from A to Z
with major modifications by Jack Keller]
A reader wrote, "Love your 30-day wine but when I bottle and cork it, I keep blowing corks off. Any ideas?"
Well, yes. For starters, use a faster yeast, like Montrachet. Second, you might want to stabilize the wine at
the end of the third week. Just put 1/2 teaspoon of potassium sorbate and one finely ground-up Campden tablet
in a cup and siphon about 1/2 cup of the wine to it. Stir until completely dissolved and add to the batch.
Third, you might want to make this a 45-day wine instead of 30-day. Just wait the extra 15 days before
bottling. Personally, I recommend all three. Here's the original recipe, but modify it as just described.
30-Day Wine
"Here is a simple recipe for 30 day wine. Many old hillbillies here in Tennessee still use this one, and
wouldn't have it any other way. They don't want any Cabernet, Merlot or Champagne; this is Tennessee, not
France. Back during my teens I used to make this, but now grow my own grapes and pick fruits in the wild."
SouthernWine
24 oz Welch's frozen concentrated grape juice, thawed
3 cups sugar
water to make up one gallon
¼ tsp dry yeast
1 1-gallon glass jug.
Mix all ingredients together well with water filling jug to about an inch below the shoulders. Cover with a
clean rag secured with rubber band. Keep in a dark place about 70 degrees. About 2 weeks later replace rag with
a good thick piece of plastic wrap. After 30 days from starting date, siphon wine off from sediment in bottom
and drink. For a good old "Mad Dog 20/20" type wine, add a pint of cheap blackberry brandy to the mix before
drinking. [Recipe by SouthernWine, from rec.crafts.winemaking newsgroup]
Remember, the recipe as published does not incorporate the three suggestions I made at the beginning of this
topic, so you would need to integrate them yourself.
I spent over an hour on this entry, only to lose it to a 1-second power loss that also required that I reset
six clocks, one answering machine, one digital thermostat, and turn off one television set and two touch-lamps that
always come on with a power surge. Scariest development of all is that it appears that the surge protector for the
computer and peripherals will no longer protect my equipment. I think I have replaced this protection at least
six times so far in 2008. I really can't rely on Reliant Energy, my electrical provider, but I have a
contract that guarantees my rate....
Surge protectors are actually cheap insurance when you think about what they actually protect. But there are
at least four other cheap insurance policies you all should have for your computer. The first three can be and
often are bundled together -- a computer firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware software. The fourth -- anti-spam
software -- is an absolute Godsend if it does what it is supposed to do and mine does. Heck, I looked in my Spam
folder at 6:15 this morning and I had just received two emails from myself and one from my wife. All three had a
male enhancement solution for me. Well, you know you have a problem when your wife is trying to sell you this kind
of stuff....
I'm not pushing any product, but I've used a free security suite for years and a commercial anti-spam product
for several months -- I think it cost less than $40 -- that almost never misses, and if it does I click on the
email, identify it as spam, and I never see the likes of it again. If you don't have an anti-virus program,
you will get a virus. It's only a matter of time. Get smart, get protected and set the automatic update
for the program's virus definition files to daily. If you don't update it, you're going to get a virus....
I get an occasional inquiry about Campden tablets and usually send a short, standardized answer explaining what
they are and what they do. If someone needs more than this, I send them to Ben Rotter's excellent essay, while
warning them of a lot of misinformation floating around on the web.
Campden tablets have been around a long time and were originally formulated to deliver a uniform dosage by weight
of sodium metabisulfite to an Imperial gallon of wort or must. When the tablet is crushed and dissolved in an
acidic liquid (like wine), a predictable amount of the sulfur binds with carbonyls, ketonic acids, sugars,
anthocyanins, and other compounds. That which does not bind is free (unbound) sulfur dioxide, a dissolved gas with
distinct anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, some anti-yeast, and anti-oxidative qualities. The tablets deliver a stronger
dose to the smaller American gallon than to the 4.5-liter Imperial gallon. About the time smaller does were offered
for the American market, the U.S. government banned the use of sodium metabisulfite in commercial wines and many
home winemakers followed suit and moved away from Campden tablets. They were then offered tablets with potassium
metabisulfite as the active ingredient. Because equal amounts of sodium metabisulfite and potassium metabisulfite
delivered about 67% and 57% SO2 respectively, there were several doses of sulfites available
at the same time and they were neither obvious nor marked to distinguish one from the other. You could be adding
anywhere from 45 to 75 ppm of free SO2.
Most local homebrew shops buy Campden tablets in bulk and repackage them in small 25- to 100-tablet lots. They
may simply identify them as "Campden Tablets" or may go so far as to actually say which of the salts is the active
ingredient, sodium or potassium metabisulfite. What you really want to know is how much free SO2
each tablet delivers at a given pH. I prefer to know the dose at 3.6 pH, although I try to make every one
of my wines more acidic than that. If they don't tell you a value, make them call their supplier and find out
before you buy the tablets. You have a right to know what you are buying and they have an obligation to tell you.
In some states they are required to place that information on the label.
You can use pure potassium metabisulfite instead of the Campden tablets, which are mostly inert binding material.
I've discussed this before -- many times, really. Take a look in my archives for the entry of May 5th, 2007; the
link is after this entry.
We all know the primary role we assign to wine yeast is to take a very perishable beverage -- grape or fruit
juice -- and rapidly convert it into something much more lasting and stable -- wine. But we know that we can
coax the yeast into producing secondary metabolites that affect the organoleptic, or sensory, qualities of wine.
I am often asked about these qualities and which yeasts produce them.
The structure and smoothness of a wine in the mouth can be enhanced in several ways, most notable of which is
high glycerol production. Several yeast strains excel in this, and if those readers not living in North American
will forgive me I am going to talk only of Lalvin yeasts, as Lalvin has introduced a wider selection than any other
producer.
Lalvin S6Uis unusual in that it is a Saccharomyces uvarum strain, but it also produces 1 to 2
grams per liter more glycerol than other strains.
Lalvin Syrah is a Côte du Rhône strain that is a high glycerol producer with good aroma development.
Lalvin T73 is a Spanish high glycerol producer that "opens up" warm climate red grapes that might
otherwise be considered lacking.
Lalvin W15 is a Swiss strain best limited to dry whites and rosés that produces higher levels of
glycerol and succinic acid.
Aroma enhancement is always desired, but some yeasts can modify aromas during fermentation by producing higher
alcohols, ethyl esters of certain acids and alcohol acetates.
Lalvin BA11 is a Portugese isolate that promotes ester formation to intensify aromatic, varietal
characteristics and lingering flavors in whites and rosé styles.
Lalvin K1-V1116 is well-known for its fresh fruit expression among certain whites due to high ester and
acetate production.
Lalvin M1 is another high esters producer at higher temperatures for white wines.
Lalvin R2 is a Sauternes strain, which says white wines, with good ester production.
Other favorable characteristics, such as color extraction and retention or high malic acic metabolization, can
be discovered among the many isolates. One only has to look.
My announcement on Halloween night that I had lost any blog entries I made between July 26th and August 23rd
and asking anyone who had copied them to email me paid off.
I want to thank the gentleman who sent me the lost entry, and yes, there was only the one I was looking for. I
want very much to reveal who it is, but have to wait to hear from him first. I have revealed names in the past
and upset people. Anyway, if you had not previously read the entry of the woman near Napa who makes private
labels, please take a look at the entry for August 3rd, 2008.
I have received the following type of email many times and usually give a rather short answer because the
long one just requires too much thought. This time I went ahead and gave it a few paragraphs, but realized I
really don't trust myself to give the long answer. Here's the incoming: "As far as sanitizing goes, is there
a functional difference between potassium metabisulfite and potassium bisulfite? I was sold 'metabisulfite' but
the bag was labeled "bisulfite" and the contents did not reek of the typical sulfur dioxide. It was a weak
sulfur dioxide. Should I return it?"
My reply: "Unless you did well in chemistry, you might not follow this.
"Potassium metabisulfite (K2S2O5) is
the pyro form of potassium sulfite and used to be called potassium pyrosulfite. Looked at another way, the
ortho or aqueous form of the salt is potassium bisulfite, also known as potassium hydrogen bisulfite (KHSO3). When the H2O is driven from the latter by heating, the salt changes
molecularly into potassium metabisulfite.
"But it really is difficult to detect one from the other when in solution. In fact, potassium metabisulfite
in solution essentially is potassium bisulfite and exerts a strong reducing effect.
"The H2O in the ortho or aqueous form (potassium bisulfite) is not the water used in
hydration, but an actual molecular bonding of hydrogen and oxygen that results in a different molecular formula,
name and compound. So, in their pure, dry forms, potassium metabisulfite is a distinctly different chemical
from potassium bisulfite, with distinctly different properties and formula and molecular structure. The pyro
(or meta) form has more of the ortho acid anion than the original ortho acid form does.
"But, again, once they are put into water and are allowed to rehydrate, they are back to the original
starting ortho acids or their corresponding anions and are indistinguishable. And if that be the case (you
might ask), should you prefer one over the other? I think the answer is yes. The major difference between
the two is that you get more sulfite per gram with metabisulfite than with bisulfite, and that is reason enough
for me.
"As for the weak sulfur dioxide you experienced, both dry forms each has a shelf life once opened to the air,
and while you have no way to know when it was originally opened for repackaging I would return it to the vender
for a refund just the same -- if for no other reason than that you bought one compound and were delivered
another. No matter how close they are, in dry form they are not the same thing"...and any vender worth his salt
will not sell you one and deliver the other.
I have twice mentioned Martin Benke's Carboy Lifter on previous blog entries and receive emails from many who
have purchased them. Thus I was not surprised when Martin's name appeared in the subject line of an email.
The message said, "After displaying my carboy lifter at my LHBC meeting, I was asked where to buy one. Martin's
e-mail address came back undeliverable. How can he be contacted?"
Martin can be somewhat difficult to reach these days, but not impossible. One of the problems is that
he and Lesley recently purchased a "get-away" home on Lake Corpus Christi and are in the process of "renovating"
it, but fishing keeps interfering with good intentions. I can identify with that. Be that as it may be, he can
be reached. Try "martinbenke[at]yahoo[dot]com" or call (210) 535-7105 and be prepared to leave a message and
practice patience.
If you are not familiar with the Carboy Lifter, navigate to the September 29th, 2007 entry in the WineBlog
archives. If you make 6-gallon batches the Carboy Lifter will save your back, and if your back is in the
same shape as mine that may well apply to 5-gallon carboys too.
Tonight I went looking for a reference I buried in one of my WineBlog entries -- probably in August
of this year -- and discovered a total bummer of a development. My entries between July 26th and August 23rd
are gone. I checked the server's files and whatever was there is gone. I have no idea how they came to be
deleted, but I unknowingly did it.
Now, to be perfectly honest, I don't know how many entries are missing; it could be two, it could be three
-- the only one I specifically remember is one featuring a lovely woman near Napa who makes private wine labels
and was good enough to share her sources and some techniques. Because I listed the link to her website at the
end of that particular entry (as well as links to various papers and inks she uses), I deleted her emails to me
that contained the same information. I have no backup file because I simply add the next post to the existing
include file and FTP the update over the old one. Somehow, I unwittingly deleted at least one entry -- possibly
more -- on my include file and overwrote the posted one when I uploaded it.
If anyone out there happened to print a copy of any WineBlog entry between July 26th and August 23rd
2008 -- even if not that exact one -- I would really appreciate a holler. I can recreate the posting[s] if
someone has it, but I really, really, really need a copy of what is missing to do it. If you can rescue
me from this nightmare, please email me.
Oh, and I already checked the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. The latest archive they have
of my WineBlog, as of this date, is February 4th, 2008. They are about as behind in posting their
updates as I am in answering email. Many of you say it to me so I am now saying it to you -- HELP!
A new winemaker wrote, "My story begins 3 weeks ago when my wife's uncle who makes his own wine convinced
me to try it myself. He showed me where to buy the juice....that's about it. Since then, I have poured my
12 gallons of cabernet, 12 gallons of syrah, 12 gallons of pinot noir and 6 gallons of savignon blanc into
fermentation vessels. All were juice, not pressed grapes. Based on the bubblers, the fermentation appears
to have stopped. I believe my next step is to rack it, but once I rack it, I don't know what to do next! I
would also like to add tannins and oak chips to heighten the taste, but am very hesitant not knowing the
particulars. Do you mind providing a little guidance as to what to do next?" Wow! That's 42 gallons of wine
sitting there!
I will not make fun of anyone for leaping before they look, especially when an in-law is pressuring you
to start a project your knowledge is ill-prepared for. I've done something similar myself in the distant past,
so I have some idea where this poor lad is coming from. Unfortunately, I cannot possibly answer his concerns
in an email -- it would take a mighty long time to write. So I did the next best thing and wrote, "Please take
20-30 minutes and carefully read the five step-links at The Basic Steps. In there you will see that you
rack, wait, rack, wait, and rack again -- as many times as is necessary to get a brilliantly clear wine. When
you rack the first time, add potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfite in prescribed amounts (1/2 teaspoon
per gallon and 1/4 teaspoon per 5 gallons, respectively). I suggest waiting 30-45 days between first and second
racking. Most of the yeast will fall out as lees during that period and the wine should be quite clear -- not
brilliant, but clear. After the second racking, wait a full 45 days. You will probably have a light dusting of
dead yeast on the bottom. Rack and wait 30 days. Check the bottom with a flashlight. If another dusting is
evident, wait the full 45 days and rack again. Usually three rackings are enough, but I've often racked as many
as five times. You rack as long as the wine throws lees.
"You can add tannin anytime. Place a small amount of powdered grape tannin (1/4 teaspoon per gallon) and a
pinch of potassium metabisulfite in a mason jar and siphon a half-cup of wine into it. Put on the lid on tight
and shake to fully integrate. Add wine to the bulk and stir with a plastic rod or wooden dowel (sanitized, of
course). Wait an hour and taste, then decide if it needs more. If it does, I would add no more than 1/8
teaspoon per gallon. When it has enough, every grain above that amount will be too much and will be tasted.
Proceed gradually.
"You can add oak dust, oak beans or cubes, or oak essence (liquid). Put the solids in nylon knee-high
ladies' stockings with a few sanitized glass marbles, tie it closed and work it carefully into the narrow neck
of the carboy. I tie it with quilting thread and leave a long piece attached, which hangs outside the carboy
when I replace the bung/airlock. It makes it easier to get it out. Oaking takes a while, so you might want to
wait until the racking is over so you can leave the oak in 2-4 months (depends on what you like taste-wise)
without having to disturb it. Just let it age a while on the oak, remove the oak, and let it age some more.
If you use the liquid essence, you only need to age it."
Another email asked the "What next?" question. "My husband and I have decided to try our hand at winemaking
since we love drinking it so much. He is a lieutenant in the Air Force and has to travel quite often so we
wanted a hobby we could enjoy doing together when he is home. I came across your website while researching
home winemaking methods. Do you have any suggestions of what type of wine would be best to make this time of
year? Its good to see that you are a Texas winemaker. We were both born and raised in Texas and my aunt and
uncle actually live in Pleasanton." What a small world.
I wrote, "You ask a difficult question because you haven't told me where you are right now, whether you
wanted to try a fruit wine or grape wine first, whether you have any winemaking equipment right now or not,
etc. So, let me just throw out some suggestions and if these do not suit your situation or desires you can
simply reject them, but at least offer me some feedback so I can narrow my focus. Right now the possibilities
are from almond wine to zucchini wine, with everything else in between.
"More than likely you were thinking grape wine, but a lot of winter fruit are being made into wines right now
(persimmon, apple, pumpkin, cranberry, etc.). With few exceptions, grapes have been harvested by now, but you
can obtain frozen crushed grapes or grape juice in 5-gallon buckets from specialty suppliers or grape wine kits
from any homebrew shop in the country. You can also buy canned grape concentrate and even frozen grape
concentrates at the supermarket. I have several friends who only make wine from Welch's 100% Frozen Grape
Concentrate -- and they win blue ribbons with it. So you have to decide what you want to do. If you choose a
kit wine (go to any shop listed at Winemaking and Homebrew Shops..." and look at what they have, but DO find
the one closest to you while you're at it), let me just say you get what you pay for. A $39 or $49 kit will
make 5 or 6 gallons of jug wine; a $79 or $89 kit will make a very good wine, and a $119 (on up) will make an
excellent wine if you can read and follow instructions.
"I prefer that people learn to make wine from scratch, but that neither suits everyone's temperament nor
fits everyone's conditions -- kits are more practical if you live in an apartment.
"But even with a kit, you need to make an investment in a minimal amount of equipment. The most expensive
thing will be the carboy -- either 3, 5 or 6 gallons, depending on the kit you select. My first carboy cost
$6; today they are 4 to 6 times that amount.
"When you walk into a homebrew / winemaking shop and say you want to start making wine, they are going to
do their best to sell you everything but the kitchen sink. Don't fall for it. Buy only what you need and that
will vary greatly depending on the kind of wine you are going to make. Kits contain all the ingredients but
none of the equipment. Many shops package equipment into "starter kits" that contain all the supplies and
equipment you will need (and a lot you won't) but none of the ingredients. Buy only what you need when you
need it. For example, if you are making a 6-gallon kit wine you will need at least an 8-gallon primary (a
food-grade plastic bucket with or without lid [you can cover it with a very clean towel or two sheets of
plastic wrap]), a 6-gallon carboy (could cost up to $40 -- just shop the web for pricing competition), a 6-foot
length of 3/8-inch clear plastic tubing to rack (siphon) the wine with, an ounce of potassium metabisulfite
(meh-tuh-by-sul-fyte) to sanitize everything with (a little goes a long ways), a bung (rubber stopper with a
hole drilled in it) to fit the carboy, and airlock (specify a "bubbler" style airlock) to force into the bung,
and a wine kit with all the ingredients. A little later, you will need 30 wine bottles, 30 corks and a corker,
but that's later -- and, if you talk to the manager of a good steak house you can get the wine bottles free
(just soak and scrape the labels off and sanitize them before using).
"On the other hand, if you have a couple of glass 1-gallon apple cider jugs laying around, you can go to the
supermarket and buy some frozen blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, etc. and make a 1-gallon batch of
fruit wine (I have over 400 1-gallon recipes on my site). It isn't rocket science. Hell, the Sumerians did
it, so you certainly can too. Let it be an adventure, but have fun doing it."
When I write something like this, I always fear it will come off as sounding condescending, but she read it in
the spirit in which it was actually written -- even provided me contact information on the aunt and uncle here in
Pleasanton. I like to help people get started, but there is so little time in each day and so many emails
I fear I will never get to....
I frequently get frantic pleas for help because a perfectly clear juice turned milky a couple of days after
adding yeast, or a dark wine lost its color after adding Campden tablets or potassium metabisulfite.
If you are not aware of this, you need to be -- the number of yeast cells in that little sachet of dry wine
yeast will multiply several hundreds of times. Indeed, the density of yeast in a vigorously fermenting must can
reach 150,000,000 (that's 150 million) cells per mL of liquid. They alone will change the opacity of the liquid,
but when each of them periodically emits a microscopic molecule of CO2 possessing near-
refractive qualities while submerged, the hue itself shifts toward white and looks "milky." This condition will
disappear when the yeast die-off wholesale.
As for the "bleaching" caused by the addition of sulfur dioxide to the must, this is a perfectly normal and
well understood phenomenon, although a tiny bit of uncertainty may linger as to which cation or ion is actually
affected in which exact way. But that is a nice-to-know -- not a must-know -- technicality when all you want to
do is make good wine. We don't really need to understand the electromagnetic spectrum to operate a television
set, so we can similarly make wine without knowing every involved chemical reaction. But it is useful to know
that the effect is more pronounced on low acid wine and less pronounced as acidity increases and/or pH decreases.
The explanation is purely chemical and beyond my layman's true understanding, but any good book on wine chemistry
will acknowledge (if not completely explain) it should you feel a need to know more. It is the anthocyanins that
are affected by the SO2. The decoloration slowly reverses, but some intensity may be
lost in the process. That is one reason I tend to make my reds a bit more acidic than the widely held standard
of 5.0 to 5.5 grams of titratable acid per liter.
And with that I shall call it a night. Happy Halloween, y'all.
I am very happy to report that my home office is once again functional, even though not even close
to what I would call back to normal. But, the computer is 80% back together -- still missing my digital
camera's docking station, memory card reader and video cam. I actually fround the latter, but not the
cables to connect it to the CPU. The others are in one of dozens of boxes in the garage and back building.
But essential functions such as email, internet connectivity (such as it is) and file transfer are now hard
wired (I was breaking the system down periodically to make way for work crews to do their thing).
Just as important to me are my references. I am looking at six shelves of books and notebooks -- not
perfectly arranged but getting there -- and I have six drawers of other material back where it belongs. If
my elation over some sense of normalcy seems curious, I would point out that the house flooded on September
6th and the last of the repairs were completed about an hour ago when the Dish Network technician left after
getting two televisions back on-line.
I received the following: "I just finished a 1 gallon batch of your Jalapeño Wine recipe and I have a
question: How do I get the smell out of my primary fermenter? It's a 1 gallon plastic bucket and I've
soaked it for a few days now but the smell of the jalapeños remains."
I replied that the essence in jalapeños is oil based, not water based. Get some fresh canola oil or
other vegetable oil and swab down the inside of the bucket. Allow to stand a half hour or so -- the
vegetable oil will absorb the jalapeño oil -- and then wash with hot water, a degreaser/detergent and more
hot water. This should work and I assume it did because I did not hear news to the contrary.
Another person wrote, "I looked up one of your recipes for Cabernet and it said to monitor MLF with
chromatography. I am wondering how I go about this as I had not heard of it until I looked at the recipe.
I looked up information on the internet but what I found didn't seem to be anything I could do without a
biochemistry degree. I you could give me any information on how to perform this test I would greatly
appreciate it."
One day I will write an essay on monitoring MLF using paper chromatography, but not today. An excellent,
non-technical article by Charles Plant on this very subject is posted on the Vancouver Amateur Winemaker's
Association website. Check the links at the end of this entry and refer to it. Another excellent
description of the process is an appendix in Jon Iverson's book, Home Winemaking Step by Step.
Paper chromatography test kits can be obtained from the better wine and homebrew shops. I have listed
one for you at the end of this entry, but feel free to try your own sources first. The kits are available
for under $40. If that is too pricey for you, just inoculate with an MLF culture and wait the indicated
period on the instructions of the culture.
A third email caught my attention. "Just picked up from a orchard a 4-gal bucket of cherry juice. The
owners make jam with the pulp but after the initial cleaning and depitting they freeze the cherries, then
thaw and drain off the first juice released from the cherries and used the pulp and remaining juice for
their jams (they say if they use all the juice the jam is just too watery and thin). So they had...20 4-gal
buckets of frozen cherry juice. How would you approach this to make wine, as a concentrate?? as a straight
juice and not dilute??? Just use your straight cherry wine recipes without the added water?? Just would
hate to ruin this with a bad experiment. Any suggestions??"
Well, yes. I suggested he ship the juice to me and I would tell him later what I did. You see, I
really have never made cherry wine from pure juice so I am just a bit reluctant to throw together a recipe
for the occasion. Instead, I suggested he do what I would do -- test for sugar (with an hydrometer or
refractometer) and acid (titration kit), correct as required, add a yeast nutrient and a yeast starter.
If the acid is high, add just enough water to get it down below 6 g/L (5.5 to 6 range). Don't shoot for
alcohol higher than 11%. It ought to be great.
I think if most of us had the juice, we would make most of our fruit wines as pure as we could. There
are some obvious high-acid or intensely flavored fruits that simply would not work well without dilution
with water, but most fruits would work with very little dilution. We dilute with water because we usually
don't have enough fruit to get enough pure juice and even if we did we would probably press the fruit too
hard to get every last drop and the wine wouldn't clear. So we have learned to use just enough fruit to
give us the recognizable flavor we want. But the writer has hit the mother lode. Not only does he have
pure juice to work with, but it is free run juice at that -- pure and clear. He should be able to produce
a wine with a strong "concentration of flavor" (to use the phrase Ben Rotter is so fond of using). If you
are not familiar with Ben, you owe it to yourself to visit his website -- it's listed in the left-hand
column of this page and the relevant page is referenced below. Unfortunately, it does not appear that Ben
has made a cherry wine from pure juice, but then neither have I.
I asked the writer for feedback. I'm sure I'm not the only person who is interested in his finished
wine.
Ken Payton's intro to Part 2 of his interview with me at Reign of Terrior was a bit embarrassing.
Overall, however, I thought the interview went well. I sure got a lot of email about it. Thank you one
and all for your kind words.
Our house is just about ready to start it's transition to normality, although I image it will be months
before that actually occurs. The whole interior has been painted and the new carpet is in. All I await
is the final crew to come in and replace the baseboards and the painter to do a little touch-up work where
the carpenters got a little wild. Then and only then can I move furniture back against the walls and start
emptying the dozens of boxes in the garage into the cabinets, chests, closets, bookcases, desk drawers,
etc. It will be so nice to have my references once again arranged to my way of thinking in the bookcases
of my study.
Thanks to a wine forum post, I recently downloaded a cool utility, the HP Smart Web Printing. It
allows you to build documents for printing from many different web sites. You grab a paragraph here, an
image there, a table, a chart, some more paragraphs -- whatever you want. You can then rearrange them,
resize them or organize it however you want. I find it handy to grab stuff for reference without having to
grab navigation bars, web ads, or other extraneous material.
If this sounds like something you are at least curious about, click on the first link below this entry
and then and click on the "Play" button to watch a demonstration. The utility is free to download.
I am often asked to identify a vine or bramble or shrub or tree based on a few words of description or
a photo or two. A recent forum discussion focused on two photographs of fruit on a tree. There wasn't a
scale of any sort to aid us. We didn't know if the fruit we were looking at were 1/4 inch or two inches
in diameter. The leaves were not the object of the photos and so were not well presented. After several
wild guesses by several people, I jumped in and gave reasons why none of the offered answers could be
correct. The people were just not paying attention to detail. One guessed mountain ash. Another guessed
currants. As poorly as the leaves were presented, they were visible as single, simple leaves. Mountain
ash has a compound leaf. Currant leaves have clear lobes.
There are a number of "keys" out there that can help you in some cases to narrow the possibilities of
what the mystery plant may be. For example, the second link following this entry is a "Key to Common Trees
of Middle Tennessee." Go to it and it will first ask you if the tree are needle- or scale-like. If so,
you go to a key of Gymnosperms (needle-leaf trees). If not, you go to the Angiosperms (broad-leaf trees)
where you select whether the tree has compound (pinnate or palmate) or simple leaves. At each decision
point, there are pictures to help you easily decide which one to choose. If you answer enough questions,
you will identify the tree or eliminate all but a very few. That is the value of keys. They help to
unlock the mystery.
The photos did not provide enough detail for the key to solve the mystery, but other clues in the
written description helped narrow it down. In the end, we thought it was a flowering crabapple.
If you want to find a botanical key for your area, go to Google and explore. I found all of the ones
listed below by searching for "key for trees and shrubs +identification". This produced 1,070,000 hits
(most of which are not helpful), so you might want to narrow it down some more by expanding the search
terms, for example: "key for trees and shrubs +identification +Texas" (that reduces it to 49,500 hits).
But you get the idea....
Someone asked if he should have added tannin to a Welch's Concord. I replied that it really depends
on his taste in wine. He may want to add a little bit (I do), but he should taste it and decide.
Welch's concentrate is made from the juice, not from the juice fermenting on the skins where a wine's
tannin comes from. One might think it's okay as is while another might think it needs just a tad more
"bite" than it has. One should let his or her taste buds be the guide.
If one decides that it does need a tannic boost, just remember that a very little bit goes a long way.
Chances are that only 1/16th to 1/8th of a teaspoon per gallon will be enough to do the job. Sprinkle the
tannin across the bottom of a small wide-mouthed glass or jar, pour a little wine in it, stir to mix, and
add that to the main body of your wine. Give it a quick stir and put the airlock on. Resist the temptation
to taste it for a few hours. Tannin needs a little time to integrate.
I was interviewed a little over a week ago by Ken Payton of the wine blog Reign of Terrior," which
I am sure most of my readers will recognize as a clever play on words. I was supposed to send Ken some photo
images to accompany the piece but as of yesterday morning had not done so and so I assumed the interview had
not yet been posted. I spent over an hour searching many, many image collections on my computer but was
unable to find one specific photo of my wife and I sitting on the porch at Poteet Country Winery. I fear I
lost it to the computer crash of 4 years ago.
While searching, I received an email from a Georgia winemaker I have only met once congratulating me on
the excellent interview and asking when the second installment would be published. Somewhat stunned, I clicked
on Reign of Terrior in my Favorites and sure enough, there it was -- Part 1 of 2. I probably dismissed
my informant a bit too abruptly and for that, Ron, I apologize. I quickly sent Ken four pix but in my haste
neglected to ask when Part 2 would be posted. Later that day I noted a comment on his blog asking that very
question and Ken replied it would be posted on Monday. So, if you are interested in the interview please
follow the first link following this entry.
The short piece in my last WineBlog about Fizzy Wine produced an almost instant email, which I was
going to ignore because there are now over 90 winemaking-related email backed up awaiting answers and it isn't
fair to them to answer one that just came in when some of them have been waiting so long. Well, I didn't
answer it, but am addressing the question raised here. The question was, "In your blog you mentioned degassing
a wine but didn't say how to do it. You referred [us] to a page on your website but didn't say where it was.
Folks, I try to be helpful. When I say, "Read my 'Basic Steps' and click on number 5," it should be obvious
that "my 'Basic Steps'" is on my website. How much intelligence does it take to go to my website and look
for something called "Basic Steps?" I'm not making fun of the person who wrote to me, but I am saying that one
really does have to use some common sense. Words have meanings. Read them with that in mind.
I went back and added a link at the end of my previous blog entry to my "basic Steps" page.
Measuring Residual Sugar
Residual sugar is the sugar that remains after fermentation. Non-fermentable sugars are no problem, but
fermentable sugars can ruin a non-stabilized wine if fermentation restarts after bottling. If you kept
close track of the sugar in the base ingredient[s] and the sugar you added to the must, you should be able
to calculate the exact amount remaining after fermentation ends using hydrometer reading and perhaps a
refractometer. However, if you are just not quite sure, you can use Clinitest tablets to give you
a reasonably accurate measure of residual sugar content when that amount is less than about 2 percent.
Clinitest tablets were developed to tell diabetics how much sugar was in their urine, but with more
convenient testing methods available Clinitest tablets are getting more difficult to find. Still, they are
sold in many large drugstores and some winemaking supply companies. You simply have to ask for them.
Clinitest tablets can be used to measure the sugar content of any wine with less that 2% residual sugar.
If the amount of sugar is more, you can use either of two alternative methods, but the margin of error will
increase. Residual sugar is determined by comparing the color of a treated wine sample with colors on a
chart provided with the kit. Anthocyanins, the color pigments in red wines, may make an exact determination
challenging, but do not seem to cause significant errors if your color vision is normal.
Clinitest Kit as sold by Homebrew Heaven contains packets of tablets, an eye dropper, a test tube, and a color calibration chart with instructions.
The directions are simplicity itself. Just be sure to have a small bottle of distilled water on hand
before you begin, something you probably will have anyway if you use a refractometer or use other testing
kits. The steps below are for the 5-Drop Method.
Draw a small amount of wine into the eye dropper.
Place 5 drops of wine in the test tube.
Rinse the eye dropper carefully (several times) with clean water.
Draw a small amount of distilled water into the eye dropper.
Place 10 drops of distilled water in the test tube.
Place one Clinitest tablet in the test tube; the contents of the test tube will begin to boil. Do not shake test tube.
When the boiling stops, wait 15 seconds, gently shake the test tube to mix the contents, and then read the sugar content by comparing the color of the liquid to the colors on the chart.
Rinse the eye dropper and the test tube thoroughly with clean water before storage for next use.
If you are fairly sure the wine has more than 2% residual sugar but less than 5%, use the 2-Drop Method,
which is the same as above except that 2 drops of wine are added to the test tube instead of 5 (step 2) and
you use the color comparison chart for the 2-Drop Method.
Alternatively, you can separately mix an equal amount of wine and water, use the 2-Drop Method using 2
drops of that liquid, and at the end double the numeric value. For example, suppose you mixed 10 drops each
of wine and water and used 2 drops of that mixture for the 2-Drop Method. Suppose your color corresponded
to 3% on the 2-Drop Method color chart. Double the result and you wine has about 6% residual sugar. Just
remember, this method does not yield as accurate a result as the other two methods do.
Sinking Hydrometer
Every once in a while someone writes to say their hydrometer sank in the finished wine and they cannot
read the scale because it is entirely under the wine. It's happened to me before, too.
The average double- or triple-scale hydrometer measures density from a low of 0.990 to a high of 1.150 or
1.170. If your starting or original gravity (o.g.) is higher than 1.170, your yeast might not be able to
expel the two byproducts of fermentation -- alcohol and CO2 -- in which case your
yeast will float to the top and probably die. You may want to make a wine that is 22% alcohol, but at least
add the sugar in stages and allow the yeast to actually make it.
Because ethyl alcohol has a specific gravity of about 0.787 and distilled water has a specific gravity
of 1.000, every percent of alcohol in your wine will lower the finished gravity (f.g.) a little more below
1.000. When your wine exceeds the most liberal allowances for a table wine (14.5% ABV), it drops off the
hydrometer scale made for normal people. That means the hydrometer sinks below 0.990 and you haven't a
clue what to do. The answer is buy a "narrow range hydrometer," also known as a "finishing hydrometer."
These cost quite a bit more than a regular wine and beer hydrometer, but they measure from 0.980 to 1.020.
You can measure your 22% ABV wine and then sweeten it until you can stomach it and measure that, too.
You can get these at the better homebrew and winemaking shops. The one listed below carries them, and
they charge about half of what I paid for mine.
After my last WineBlog entry I received a phone call asking what I thought of the chocolate wines
archive page on the blog, Washington Winemaker. This caught me a little off guard, as I had to think
a moment to recall the blog while at the same time I was trying to sort out an obvious disguised voice. Then
two faces came into my mind's eye -- a cheery face from Bellevue, Washington under an outdoorsman's hat and a
dear old friend now residing in Missouri. Yes, I recalled an archive page on chocolate wine and mead
discussions, but no mention of the recipes on my site. It's okay; Erroll has been linked to my blog for a
long time and I only recently linked to his.
I recall an entry he made about whether cocoa powder is better than extract, and his recitation of the SCA
chocolate mead recipe by Lord Rhys, which is quite credible and quite humorous if I recall correctly. So,
once the recollections began to flow I asked the caller (a friend who was trying his best to pretend he was
a stranger) if there was anything about the Bellevuer's discussions he wanted to point out in particular or
question. Now he was caught off guard. After a pregnant pause, he said he liked the "Liquid Sex Mead"
recipe -- the Lord Rhys recipe. I remarked that he should...that it's probably the only sex he's getting.
He cracked up and dropped the attempt to disguise his voice and we caught up on family news. I am blessed
to have such friends.
Using a Food Processor
I am frequently asked if a food processor can be used to prepare fruit for winemaking. The answer is
"yes," but you really ought to open the fruit and remove the seeds first. A great many seeds contain
alkaloids, cyanides or other compounds that will spoil a wine and potentially a life if cracked or chopped.
Apple seeds, for example, contain small amounts of cyanide, but are perfectly safe if not cracked or chopped.
Fizzy Wine
A reader wrote to me that he had made many batches of wine over the years, but very simply. He had
recently been given a hydrometer and when his next batch reached 1.000 he bottled it. When he tasted it
later, it was fizzy, so he unbottled it and has it back under an airlock. Naturally, he wanted to know what
went wrong.
I wrote him that fizzy wine means one of two things.
(1) The wine needs degassing. The gas that escapes through the airlock is CO2, and wine absorbs quite a
bit of it. Normally, with several rackings and a few months of aging, the CO2 dissipates into the air. You
can speed it up by degassing the wine. Read my "Basic Steps" and click on number 5.
(2) The wine is bottled before it finishes fermenting. In his case, the hydrometer reading of 1.000 did
not mean the wine was finished, and even if it did you should let it bulk age a while. No commercial winery
bottles a wine (except for Nouveaux Beaujolais) with less than 8 months aging. A wine with 1.000 specific
gravity still has about 1% unfermented sugar in it. The best practice is to wait until the liquid in the
airlock levels out and then take a gravity reading if you’re curious. A finished wine can have an
s.g. of 1.000, but more than likely it will be at the lower end of between 1.000 and 0.990, and it still has
to be degassed.
Lost Recipes
Over the years, many people have read where I lost 720 posted recipes when the server they were stored on
was lost in a fire and I had foolishly reformatted the media that held my only backup. My heart is warmed
when someone offers to help me restore the lost recipes with typing help, organizing them or whatever is
required. I always turn them down with a personal letter, but I thought I would share my reasons here to
discourage future offers -- not that I don’t appreciate them.
The time-consuming part was not organizing and arranging them alphabetically, but typing them in the
first place and writing the method (instructions) for each in a consistent format and style. And to be
honest, for many of them there were no instructions at all -- just a list of ingredients.
The recipes still exist, but they are in dozens of formats. About half are in the 200+ books I have on
winemaking and the rest are in magazine articles, newspaper clippings, both typed and hand-written letters,
3 X 5 cards, notes or list of ingredients written on napkins or scraps of paper, very old family wine logs
(in journal form), my own wine logs, etc. It took 5 months to locate, organize and write them the first
time, and that was spending every waking hour on the project when I was not at work. I will never do that to
my wife again, so I dig them out when someone requests one or I develop a particular desire to add one to a
particular collection.
Please understand that I will never let this material out of my possession; it has taken 43 years to
collect it. Besides, when a recipe consists of just a list of ingredients, as all of the ones (about 55-60)
on the 3 X 5 cards do, then someone has to work out the method and do it in a reasoned manner written in a
consistent style. It is just something I have to do it myself.
I very much appreciate the many kind offers. I hope you all understand.
I should have disconnected and moved my computer instead of writing the last entry. The clean-up guys did
it instead, and then started emptying shelves and bookcases and work tables, building a small mountain of
books and papers and other things around my carboys. The computer and all its components and peripherals
completely disappeared. I won't go into the week-long ordeal but suffice it to say the house is dried out, an
insurance check arrived, and carpet has arrived but cannot be installed until some major painting is finished.
It will be weeks -- more likely months -- until the house is put back together.
But I couldn't stand being without a computer so I finally found enough of it to get a signal through my
wireless antenna mast outside. I'll have to disconnect it again for painting and carpeting, but at least I get
to post a WineBlog entry. I'm sure that's all that's important to you.
Numbers
I was playing around and started searching to see who was linked to my site and discovered I didn't really
want to know. The total number when I searched was 8,659 links, of which 2,307 are to my home page and 1,988
to this WineBlog. I was quite surprised to find that 326 linked to my dandelion wine recipes. And my
heart was quite moved that six people chose to link to my dear departed Springer Spaniel's web page.
A Look Back at Maraschino-Chocolate Mead
Some of you may remember that back on January 13th, 2007 I wrote in the WineBlog about making a
Maraschino-Chocolate Sweet Mead. I bottled it in May and finally entered it in competition last Sunday at
the Medina County Fair, one of the better county fairs in Texas with a tough bunch of local winemakers to
compete against. It won runner-up (Honorable Mention) to Best of Show for non-grape wines, which is not
bad for a debut.
Left to right, Best of Show judge Marlene Nebgen helps Jack Keller display his ribbons while the other Best of Show judge, Larry Lothringer, looks dead serious.
In my Requested Recipes write-up of this mead, I mentioned that you have to read the label of the
cherries you use. Some contain the preservative benzoic acid, which has the same affect on yeast as sorbic
acid (potassium sorbate) -- it prevents reproduction.
By the way, I used pretty good honey, boiled it and skimmed off a decent amount of impurities as surface
scum, so the fact that this mead dropped a fine dust for about a year indicates lingering yeast in the mead,
not pollen in the honey. I could have fined it to drop the yeast out, but the long clearing process only
helped it age well. It's a very nice dessert mead.
Elderberry Goo
A reader wrote, "This past week, for the first time, I decided to make a batch of wine from fresh
elderberries.... After transferring the wine to the secondary I'm seeing a 4" wide brown ring of this
substance that has a consistency somewhere between rubber and VERY tacky glue. My dad has made wild elderberry
wine before and says this happens every time. I'm wondering if you've ever run into this and, if you did, how
did you clean your primary out? I pressure washed a lot of it out, but it's REALLY stubborn. Any suggestions?"
I am well familiar with this residue. It is the famous "elderberry goo." Canola oil (or any good
vegetable oil) will cut it effectively. The canola oil is then washed away with a degreaser (the degreaser
will not cut the goo). Over a decade ago three of us systematically tried 46 different substances before
one of the others discovered the vegetable oil cure.
Disaster today. I was outside trying to impress upon a bunch of weeds that I was boss in this yard and
they were not welcome. Having done so for a sufficient period of time to hear complaints from my back, I quit
for the day and came inside to take a muscle relaxer and have a cold beer. As I opened the refrigerator, an
unfamiliar noise in another part of the house caught my attention. I turned and saw water coming from the hall
into the kitchen and the rest was a blur.
The flexible steel feeder pipe under the toilet had burst. The bathroom, hallway, three bedrooms, foyer,
part of the living room, and my computer room/office were either flooded or the carpet was soaked and the
water was spreading, like some ill-defined but spineless creature from a horror movie. As I write my feet
are in water. So, you might ask, why am I writing instead of attending to the problem? Because I have done
all I can do and am waiting on a company that either sucks water out of carpets or rips out the carpet itself
to arrive (I've been waiting for over 5 hours). During the time I moved 27 boxes of "stuff" out of the back
bedroom into the only dry spot in the house, the part of the living room just in front of the fireplace. If
they don't show up soon, I'll have to move them all again -- out to the garage, I guess. Oh, the company I'm
waiting on just called and said they will be here in about an hour. That's the third time they have called
me and said they would be here in an hour. My faith is faltering....
Moving Wine
I think they will rip out the carpet. It has been wet way too long and is sloshy. Anticipating this, I
moved all my carboys and gallon-jugs with airlocks into the three of the four areas with tile flooring (very
small kitchen, dining room and front and back door entries after I mopped up about 8 gallons of water from
the tile (with a towel). I hope this is not a mistake. I also emptied a 140-bottle wine rack sitting on
carpet and stacked the cases on either side of the front door (tile, so not affected after water was mopped
up). This would not have been possible if I did not have about 10 empty cases in a storage shed and another
half dozen in the garage. My back is going to protest this activity later.
Must be Time for Pears
I have received more than a few emails and snail mails asking about pears. I remember when I had Bartlett
trees, lost 7-8 years ago to blight, they would be loaded by late June, but wouldn't ripen until later August
to early September. Still, seeing them loaded with fruit would get the itch started and I would impatiently
await the slow and subtle ripening. When they started dropping, I got out the ladder and buckets. You don't
really want your pears to ripen on the tree, but rather in a cool room. Then the trick is to catch them just
right....
There are too many varieties of pears to keep track of (around 5,000, I'm told), but I am familiar with a
few. I don't know if there is such a thing as "the noble dozen" in pears, but a long time ago my grandfather
told me there was. I believed anything he told me, although he was known to pull my leg whenever he thought
he could get away with it (he gave me a rock once and convinced me it was a petrified potato, and I took it to
school for "show and tell" -- what fun the kids had at my expense!). Anyway, the "noble dozen" pear
varieties my long departed grandfather had me memorize are the Bartlett, Bosc, Clapp, Comice, Concorde,
d'Anjou, Delicious, Forelle, Hardy, Highland, Nellis, and Seckle. In truth, I think these are simply the only
twelve variety names my grandfather knew, but that's okay. Over the years I had several opportunities to
rattle them off and it always gives the impression I know more than I do.
My phone keeps ringing (insurance claims department, clean-up guys, insurance adjuster, wife, etc.) and I
can see I'm not going to develop this topic the way I intended. I will list some pear wine recipes after this
entry for those who are interested, but I will have to stop here as the clean-up guys called again and are
finally entering Pleasanton (after a 7-hour wait). I'll have to post this later, as circumstances permit.
A few weeks ago a guy came by to give me a bottle of wine. It was green. The label said it was cherry
wine. "What kind of cherries were these?" He looked at me like I was mentally deficient. "Green cherries,"
he said. "You know, in those little jars. I used 10 jars in the wine." I should have known. It was a tad
too sweet for my taste, but that's just me. He thought it was just right.
Different tastes. That's why we like our own wines, isn't it? And maybe the pride of making it. I kind
of like making wines from unusual base ingredients. Most of the wines I make have few, if any, commercial
counterparts. So I understood the green cherries. Any schmuck could make wine from red cherries. I raised
my glass to him. "I wish I had thought of this." He beamed. I saw myself.
Simple Question
It is frustrating to have a simple question and not be able to find the answer when you know darned well
thousands of people know the answer. This was the case recently, when a reader wrote with what he
knew was a very elementary question but one he could not find the answer to. I've been there, so I know how
he feels. I'm just glad I was here to answer it. In the pre-internet days, we sometimes went months to
years to find someone who could answer such questions. Here is his question: "When making white wine, in my
case muscadine wine, I want to keep the wine from picking up the color from the skins and know I need to
separate the skins, but do I remove just the skins and leave the pulp or do I remove both the skins and the
pulp. Simple as it may sound, I can't find the answer."
There are two answers. The most common way to approach the problem is to use a crusher that feeds directly
into a basket or bladder press. The grapes are pressed as soon as the basket or bladder is full and the juice
is separated from the skins, pulp and seeds.
The other way is labor intensive and therefore only used for small batches -- 1-3 gallons. The grapes are
individually picked off the cluster and squeezed so as to expel the pulp and juice. The skin is then
discarded. The pulp is treated with pectic enzyme to break it down and then it and the juice are fermented
and later pressed. I made a Grand Champion Mustang Grape wine the first time I used this method.
New Grapes
New grapes are being bred all the time, but most are culled by the breeder because they don't possess
some desired quality or characteristic. For every few hundreds that are culled, one might be deemed worthy
of trial introduction. Many of these disappear after a while or end up as rarities in collections,
conservatories or gardens. T. V. Munson grew thousands of crosses and introduced scores of new grapes, but
many are lost. You actually have to make a few crosses to appreciate how rarely a quality new grape results.
It is therefore quite exciting when a major breeding program announces the introduction of a new grape.
Thomcord, a sweet, seedless grape from ARS’s Parlier, California, breeders, resulted from crossing a Thompson with a Concord. Photo by Stephen Ausmus.
The USDA's Agricultural Research Service has many breeding programs spread across a wide spectrum of plants
of commercial interest. Several such programs are dedicated to grapes. One such program is located at the
ARS San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Sciences Center at Parlier, California. Back in the 1980s research
horticulturist David Ramming and technician Ronald Tarailo performed a laboratory experiment to hybridize a
Thompson Seedless with a Concord in a new way to produce a superior seedless grape. Hundreds of new vines
were grown and evaluated, and one, A29-67, showed promise. After 17 years of evaluation A29-67 was named
Thomcord and is finally being released to growers.
Thomcord is a plump, juicy, blue-black grape with "...whitish bloom and bold flesh color of the Concord,
plus a pleasing Concord-like flavor that's lightened by the sweet, mild taste of its Thompson parent. The
fruit is slightly firmer than Concord." This is a table grape, but I enjoy eating good table grapes as much
as I like drinking the fermented juice of good wine grapes. Look for Thoncord in your supermarket in a few
years.
Wine to Vinegar
A reader wrote about a friend whose wines are turning to vinegar despite using clean vessels. He
wonders, of course, what could be causing this reaction?
Vinegar is produced by bacteria of the genus Acetobacter, with well over a dozen species, e.g. A.
aceti, A. cerevisiae, A. cibinongensis, A. estunensis, A. indonesiensis, A.
lovaniensis, A. malorum, A. nitrogenifigens, A. oeni, A. orientalis, A.
orleanensis, A. pasteurianis, A. peroxydans, A. pomorum, A. syzygii, A.
tropicalis, A. xylinus.
The old lore had it spread by a "vinegar fly," but there really isn't any such thing -- just fruit flies
and gnats that may be carrying the bacteria, any of which can spread it. However, the more common way to get
it is to have individual cells "blow in" and settle in the primary, carboy or wine while being transferred.
In other words, clean equipment is important, but so is a clean environment. Once an area gets contaminated
with the bacteria, it pretty much stays contaminated until appropriately cleansed. The bacteria can settle
on a countertop, the side of a cabinet door, on a spice rack, or practically anywhere and get stirred up into
the air by winemaking activities.
There are three approaches to combating Acetobacter: sanitize the work area, treat the must and
resulting wine, and eliminate oxygen.
An infected work area is difficult to sanitize, but not impossible. Many years ago I started detecting
acetic acid (vinegar) in a few of my wines. I treated them immediately with sulfites and killed the bacteria,
then buffered the wines to get rid of the acid and introduced new acids to the wines. But new wines also
developed the problem. So I took a three pronged approach. First, I sanitized the kitchen; then I treated
the musts and wines and adjusted ullage.
I mixed up a 5% sulfite solution and used several old dish towels to swab down every surface in our
kitchen, the area where I made my wines. That included the ceiling, the walls, the countertops, the floor,
the cabinets, the inner cabinet doors, stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, coffeemaker, food
processor, shelves, spice rack and containers, canisters, hanging utensils, paper towel rack, etc. Then I
sanitized everything that couldn't be swabbed down. Inside each cabinet I set a quart jar of 10% sulfite
solution and closed the door for 5 minutes, then opened the door and moved it to another shelf. In the
drawers I set a soup bowl with the 10% sulfite solution. The sulfur dioxide fumes rising off the sulfite
solution is actually what kills the bacteria. It took 11 hours to sanitize the entire kitchen, but when I
was done I knew there were very few bacteria of any kind in there.
I never got another case of vinegar, but to be safe I always sulfite my musts and wines with potassium
metabisulfite. It kills almost every bacteria and fungus known to man, and then it dissipates over time. My
recipes will say Campden tablets because anyone can count one tablet per gallon and crush it, but in truth I
never use them anymore. I have a very small spoon that measures 1/16th of a teaspoon of potassium
metabisulfite, which is exactly the amount needed per gallon of must and the amount of active ingredient in
a Campden tablet -- all the rest of the tablet is inert binder material that has to be crushed, ground up
very fine and dissolved just to deliver that 1/16th teaspoon of K-meta.
The third approach to combating Acetobacter is to reduce the ullage (the air space in a carboy) as
much as possible. I try to reduce it to 1/4 to 1/2 inch. Acetobacter converts ethanol into acetic
acid in the presence of oxygen, so if you reduce the oxygen you reduce the amount of acetic acid it can
produce if it happens to infect the wine when the dose of sulfite is dissipating into nothingness. It isn't
very likely to happen because I add sulfites after every other racking, but it pays to be cautious.
If one just concentrates on the latter two approaches -- using sulfites and reducing the ullage -- one
should be fine, but sanitizing the work environment is something everyone should constantly work on. An easy
way to do it is to wait until you are going away for a weekend and then to mix up a gallon of 10% sulfite
solution, pour it into several pie tins and cake pans dispersed around the kitchen or work area, open all the
cabinet doors and drawers, and then leave. Upon returning, dump the sulfite solution down the drain and
close up the cabinets and drawers. It won't do as thorough a job as what I did, but it will go a long way
toward keeping all types of bacteria (and fungus) to a minimum.
Yes, I know it has been over three weeks since I last posted here. No need to write and remind me. Where have
I been? Beijing. Not in person, but via satellite TV. Sorry. The Olympics simply are addictive to me. But
I suffered for it. When I was younger, I only needed 4 hours sleep a night. Not so now. Staying up until
12:30 to 1:00 a.m. and then getting up at 6:00 for two weeks straight has taken its toll. As soon as I get
home each afternoon / evening I have to take a nap. One day I started the nap before I got home. Thank God
and the Texas Department of Transportation they have those grooves just outside the shoulder lines -- woke me
right up and adrenaline kept me awake.
Like many of you, I saw the Nike commercial during the Olympics in which Marvin Gaye sang a portion of the
American national anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner", while the U.S. basketball team suited up and took the
court. And, like many of you, I wished I could hear the entire Marvin Gaye performance. Well, I found it.
Watch, and be enchanted.
I can't imagine not liking that. Enough said. On to winemaking....
It Must Be Time for Rhubarb
I have received several emails about rhubarb within the past 2-3 weeks, which tells me the rhubarb stalks
are ripening. Rhubarb is a perennial whose cultivation originated in Asia over 2,000 years ago for medicinal purposes.
A close relative of garden sorrel, rhubarb is a vegetable; the edible portion is the long, thick petioles -- the
stems (stalks) that support the leaves. The roots are large, fleshy rhizomes which impart purgative or laxative
actions and are commonly prescribed in folk medicine for those qualities.
I have no idea how many species and varieties there are, but I know there are many -- from the small Rheum
compactum averaging 19 inches high to the majestic Rheum palmatum, with 6-foot petioles of superior
flavor and 10-foot flower stems. The Western garden varieties average 2-3 feet in height and are Rheum
rhaponticum, Rheum x hybridum, Rheum rhabarbarum, and Rheum x cultorum. In the East
(Asia), Rheum officinale, Rheum palmatum, Rheum ribes, and Rheum spiciforme prevail
in the garden.
Rhubarb stalks, trimmed of leaf
The average man on the street thinks rhubarb stalks have to be red or they aren't ripe or aren't sweet, but
colors vary among species and varieties and color and sweetness are not necessarily related. Ripe petioles can
be bright to deep red, pink, green, or speckled. Canada Red, Chipman, Cherry Red Crimson, Glaskin's, Holstein
Bloodred, Macdonald, Mammoth Red, Tilden, and Valentine are all varieties that ripen red. German Wine, Riverside
Giant and Victoria typically ripen green, sometimes with a pink base or pink speckles.
The leaves grow straight from the ground; there is no trunk or base, The leaves typically grow up to a foot
or more in width and length and the plant may grow to a height of several feet. The green leaves of the plant
are quite toxic -- even poisonous -- containing high concentrations of oxalic acid crystals which can cause the tongue and throat to
swell and prevent breathing. The stalks, on the other hand, have little if any oxalic acid but what little they
may have can easily be neutralized. To use the stalks, they are trimmed of all leafy material and cut into
pieces.
Rhubarb stalks, cut for use
There are basically four approaches to making wine from rhubarb, but all require cutting it into pieces first.
(1) The pieces are then crushed and pressed to extract the juice, which is fermented; (2) the pieces are covered
with sugar to draw out most of the juice as liquor, which is then separated from the pieces and fermented alone
or fermented pieces and liquor together and pressed before transfer to secondary; (3) the pieces are frozen,
thawed and then processed as (1); (4) the pieces are frozen, thawed and then processed as (2).
Here are four recipes using the four approaches. Two use precipitated chalk to buffer oxalic acid because
the rhubarb used seem to require it, while two do not because the rhubarb used tasted fine. You have to use
your own judgement regarding your own rhubarb.
Rhubarb Wine (1)
6 lbs rhubarb
2 lbs sugar
2 tsp citric acid
1 tsp yeast nutrient
6-1/2 pts water
1/2 oz precipitated chalk
1 finely crushed and dissolved Campden tablet
Wine yeast (Montrachet or Champagne) in starter solution
Trim, wash and cut the rhubarb. Add 5 pints of the water into which is dissolved 1 finely crushed Campden
tablet and the sugar. Cover and set aside for 3 days, stirring twice a day. Strain the rhubarb (save the water)
and press it dry, then discard the pulp. Combine the sugared water and juice and add the chalk; when the fizzing
subsides, add the remaining ingredients (except the reserved 1-1/2 pints water) and ferment in gallon jug covered
with clean cloth until vigorous fermentation subsides. Add reserved water and attach airlock. Ferment to
dryness, racking every 3-4 weeks until clear. Stabilize, sweeten to taste and age about 3 months. Rack if
needed and bottle. Allow 8-12 months before tasting. [Author's own recipe]
Rhubarb Wine (2)
4 lbs rhubarb
1 cup white grape concentrate
1 lb 13 ozs granulated sugar
1-1/2 qts boiling water
1 tsp citric acid
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1/4 tsp grape tannin
2/3 tsp pectic enzyme
1 finely crushed and dissolved Campden tablet
2 qts cold water
1 pkt Champagne wine yeast
Place cut rhubarb and sugar in primary and mix well. Cover primary for 24 hrs. Crush rhubarb with a piece of
hardwood or the bottom of a non-punted wine bottle. Pour boiling water over the crushed rhubarb, stir vigorously
and recover primary. When water cools, ladle or scoop rhubarb into a straining bag and squeeze as much of the
juice out as possible. Discard pulp. Add the grape juice, citric acid, yeast nutrient, tannin, crushed Campden
tablet, and cold water. Cover and wait 12 hours. Add pectic enzyme, recover and wait another 12 hours. Add
activated yeast starter and ferment until vigor subsides. Transfer to secondary, ferment to dryness, rack every
3-4 weeks until clear. Bottle dry or stabilize and sweeten, age 3 more months, rack if needed, and bottle. Age
6-9 months before tasting. [Author's own recipe]
Rhubarb Wine (3)
4 lbs rhubarb
2 lbs sugar
juice of 2 large oranges
2/3 tsp pectic enzyme
1 tsp yeast nutrient
6-1/2 pts lukewarm water
Red Star wine yeast
Wash and cut the rhubarb, then place in ZipLoc freezer bags and freeze at least a week. Dump in colander
to thaw over primary. When thawed, squeeze out as much of the juice as you can. Stir in remaining ingredients
except yeast. Cover and set aside 12 hours, then add activated yeast in starter solution and recover. Recover
and ferment 3 days. Stir, pour through funnel into secondary and attach airlock. Ferment to dryness. Rack
monthly until clear. Bottle dry or stabilize and sweeten, age 3 more months, rack if needed, and bottle. Age
6-9 months before tasting. [Author's own recipe]
Rhubarb Wine (4)
4 lbs rhubarb
2 lbs sugar
350 mL pineapple juice or 450 mL orange juice
2/3 tsp pectic enzyme
1 finely crushed Campden tablet
1/2 oz precipitated chalk
1 tsp yeast nutrient
Water to 1 gal (about 6-1/2 pts)
Campagne wine yeast activated in starter solution 12-14 hours prior to use
Wash and cut the rhubarb, then place in ZipLoc freezer bags and freeze at least a week. Remove and place in
primary to thaw. Sprinkle very finely crushed Campden tablet and then the sugar over rhubarb in even layer.
Cover primary with lid or plastic sheet for 36 hours. Sprinkle pectic enzyme and precipitated chalk over mixture,
stir well and recover the primary. Wait additional 36 hours and add all remaining ingredients. Ferment about
5 days, then strain out the rhubarb and press it. Combine pressed juice with fermenting liquor, transfer to
secondary and affix airlock. Ferment to dryness. Rack monthly until clear. Bottle dry or stabilize and sweeten,
age 3 more months, rack if needed, and bottle. Age 6-9 months before tasting. [Author's own recipe]
I'm drinking a glass of Malbec that was a gift. The label says it is a kit wine and that got me to thinking.
I have absolutely no access to fresh Malbec grapes, so if I wanted to make some Malbec I would turn to a kit as
the better of the
November 17th, 2008
