Remember, back in January, when I was messing around with some homemade wine and making up my own recipes? Well, after five months of uninterupted yeast action, Jamie and I spent an evening tasting, mixing, and bottling the wine.
This wine was made in small batches in my big crock, and then put into gallon sized bottles for the secondary fermentation. I didn't have enough air-locks, so I used a balloon on one of the bottles, and it seemed to work pretty well. It inflated with gas right away, and then slowly lost it so the bottle ended up with a floppy pink balloon cap.
To reward ourselves for our hard work, we opened a bottle of our home brewed barely wine, which is one of the most flavorful beers we have ever made. So pretty and sparkly. And look at that foam!
The foam on the beer was so perfect I wished I had a mustache so I could take a big swig, and then do the forarm wipe like I've seen burly men do on TV when enjoying a beer stein. I had to settle for trying to capture Jamie's attempt at a beer-stache. I don't think he was doing it right because he had an embarrassingly small amount of foam stick to his stache. Maybe the beer stein is the key to a good facial hair foam coating?
We tried something different to sterelize our wine bottles this time. I've used bleach in the past, but it takes so long to rinse the bleachy smell away and seems sort of toxic. I've used sanitizer that I bought at the store, which works great but I didn't have any. Iodine also works well, and doesn't have to be rinsed so many times, but I was out of that too. So, this time we soaked the clean bottles in hot vinegar water, and then rinsed them with peroxide. It was nice not to worry about ruining our clothes and towels with bleach or iodine stains.
We used a little tray table under the kitchen counter as our bottling station. Jamie used a headlamp to shine through the gallon bottle while he siphoned the wine off the sediment so he could tell if we were disturbing any sediment. I manned the other end of the siphon hose as I filled each bottle. And, since there is always a little wine that won't fit in the bottle, or is left in the siphon, we tasted each batch as we went. It was all too young, but we found that some of the wine was better sweetened with stevia, and on ice. We made sure to have a glass of beer nearby to clense our palates between batches. No matter how much we tasted, the wine never graduated to tasting good. Jamie's sophisticated taste buds were picking up essence of cigarette butt, and the always unpleasant "battery lick" that comes with a really high alcohol content. I hope it gets better with time, or I figure out how to mix it with something to improve it, because I have twenty new bottles to enjoy!
The labels got quite elaborate as I tried to indicate the different ingredients and different secondary fermentation conditions. Here is a list of the wine labels:
- Pear+plum+clove, w/ brown sugar (on sediment)
- Pear+plum+clove, w/brown sugar (with ballon on secondary)
- Pear+plum+clove, w/brown sugar
- 1/3 Pear+plum+clove, and 2/3 cranberry+grape+raisen
- cranberry+grape+raisen
- cranberry+grape+raisen (topped up with 2012 strawberry wine)
After I had already labeled the bottles I remarked to Jamie that technically, I didn't use plums, I used prunes in the pear wine. "Prunes! No wonder!" he says. What's wrong with prunes?
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