First Wine Post

The hairy vetch and ryegrass are just growing slowly on their own. Not much to do or to say about it, so its time for something else. Wine! As you may or may not know, I've made a few batches of beer from kits and I've made several batches of wine from kits as well. I think I like the wine more for a couple reasons. Primarily, I like a good wine more than I like a good beer. The three wine kits have been a Gewurztraminer, a Pinotage, and a Riesling. The Gewurz got rave reviews immediately, the Pinotage started out so-so, but has been getting better (too bad we only have 3 bottles left!), and the Riesling was ehhh. Perhaps that one will get better. We still have 20 or so bottles of that, so I hope so.

The Riesling suffered from a couple errors during the bottling process. Most notably, the siphon slipped into the lees during final racking, which resulted in a significant amount of lees in the bottles. Also, I run the wine through coffee filters as I'm doing the final racking for an extra level of clarification. The coffee filters and funnel set-up fell into the finished wine twice. Ooops. The result was bottles of wine that have sediment, and may actually still be fermenting slightly in the bottles. It seems to have a slight bubbly sensation when you drink it.

With the exception of the bottling errors, the kits turned out relatively well. Time to ratchet it up a level of difficulty and make wine from grape juice or right from grapes.

After doing some internet searching, the only place in the finger lakes I could find that sells grapes and juice is Fallbright, on the eastern shore of Keuka lake. Some of the Grapes and Juice are surprisingly expensive. Riesling and Gewurztraminer (arguably the grapes best suited for the Finger lakes and therefore quite tasty) cost around $20/gallon. 5 gallons will make around 25 bottles worth, so thats $4/bottle, not including the chemicals, bottles, corks, equipment, and time necessary to make it. On the other end of the spectrum, there are grapes like concord, which are only $6/gal. I decided to go for a mid-range grape this time. I remember having tasty Seyval wines before, and that was only $9/gal, so thats what I decided on.

I had initially wanted to go right from the grapes, but when you take into account the amount of juice that can be squeezed from the grapes, the juice is actually a bit cheaper. If you do buy grapes, their website says that you can use their crusher and presser for free to get the juice out.

Last saturday Jaime and I took the afternoon to drive over there and pick up the juice and a bunch of supplies. Thats the place below. Sorry about the quality of the picture. I forgot to bring my camera and had to use the iphone. Kind of surprising how bad the picture turned out. I think it must have been focusing/light-reading from the clouds.

The place is basically a little shack with a bunch of chemicals inside and some machinery for grape processing out back. You can see some grape vines behind the shack and Keuka lake in the background. I asked them how much of the grapes/juice they produced there and they said all but three of the red varieties (I can't remember which ones). We picked up the juice and a bunch of chemicals and supplies. I figured while I was there, I'd pick up enough stuff so that I could make one or two more batches and all I would need would be the juice. Hopefully this will allow me to make something weird like a fruit wine. With the 6 gallons of Seyval juice and everything else, the total came to about $145 including tax. I'd guess that about $100 of that will be used for making this batch of wine.