Winemaking 101: Chapter 1

We have been talking about making our own wine for almost 3 years.  Both of our grandfathers, at varying points in their lives, made homemade wine.  For various reasons--mainly moving around--we have not been able to start that project.  Upon moving into our house here, we determined that we were finally going to make wine.  Then came the question of what to make.  We both love mead and have talked about making our own almost as long as we've talked about making wine.

Since we still have two mortgages (that and we're just cheap), we decided to attempt this as frugally as possible.  As much as we'd like to make mead, honey is really very expensive.  So to start, we thought we could use a fruit that we know is used to make wine and is free, abundant, and readily accessible in our own yard.  I'm sure you can guess where this is going.  That's right: chokecherry wine!

So we bought the bare minimum of what we needed just to start.  When we were up in Fox, AK, for the Permafrost Tunnel tour, we brought our 5-gallon water jug to fill with water at the natural spring to use that water for our wine.  Silver Gulch Brewing & Bottling Company, located in Fox, uses the spring water to brew all their beer.  As I said in a previous post, we hauled drinking water from this spring for an entire month when we lived halfway between Fairbanks and Fox.  Countless people in the area use this spring water for drinking and cooking, including people from all the way down in North Pole, AK.

Our daughter loves to help get "Fox water."

Fillin' her up.  Yes, we had completely sterilized the bottle.

So last Saturday night we finally got to the business of starting our first five gallons of wine, with plenty of delays and false starts!