Winemaking 101: Chapter 3

After a week of our house smelling like yeast, we acquired a 5-gallon carboy and auto-siphon to transfer the wine for secondary fermentation.  Taking the cover off the top of the bucket revealed something that looked like sediment on top of the wine.

First things first, you have to pull the bag of fruit out and try to squeeze out as much of the liquid as possible.

This was something we were not prepared for and I almost wished we were doing it in the garage.  As my husband squeezed and rung it out, we got some sprays of juice on the cupboards, floor, and ourselves!  (Yes, those gloves look serious and they are serious gloves, but he works in the medical field, so it's what we had to keep both his hands clean and the wine from being contaminated by his hands.) Once that was done, we decided to let the sediment settle again before siphoning.

Just after this, we put the bucket on a chair.

Such a pretty color!

The auto-siphon is a beautiful thing and not much more expensive than a regular siphon that you have to suck on to get started.  Not only is it easier because it's just a pump, but it keeps things as sterile as possible.  As we were transferring the wine, we both couldn't stop marveling at what a nice color it had.  They say to take as much of the liquid as possible, even if it means you're taking sediment with it.

More Fox Spring water, of course.

As you can see, the next step is to fill the rest of the carboy with water because we took out a large bag of fruit, so this is how to get five gallons of wine.  Finally, you have to close it with an airlock, which gets filled with water, so that the wine stays in an anaerobic environment during secondary fermentation, allowing air to escape but not enter.  We then moved it down into the basement and put the warming belt on it.  It will stay there for 4-6 weeks.  

Of course, we couldn't do this without sampling a little of the product so far.  We poured two glasses: one straight from the siphon and one from the drippings of the bag of fermented fruit.

From the siphon.

From the fermentation bag.

The glass on the left tasted more like very sweet rotten fruit than wine.  The glass on the right tasted much, much less like rotten fruit, but it still definitely has a long way to go!  We're looking forward to tasting the next stage in about a month, though it will still have aging to do after that, too.

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!