Joy of Home Wine Making (38 page)

Gelatine and bentonite do not have to be removed.

Some finings require tannin in order to react, but tannin is easily added.

Filtering on a small scale with gravity methods isn’t very easy, and it can hurt your wine through oxidation if you take too long to do it. The old books describe some of these gravity methods. I don’t think they are a good idea. The benefits aren’t great enough to merit the trouble and risk.

For larger amounts of wine, there are many devices available on the market that involve hand pumps or carbon dioxide pressure tanks combined with filter pads that can remove amazingly small particles. If you have carefully racked, then fined, your wine, it won’t take very long to go through the filtering procedure—including setting up and taking down. It will give you the “star bright” wine of wine competition dreams. The devices, like Vinamat and Polyrad, cost less than one hundred dollars.

Investigate the brands carefully and make sure you know what is in the pads, how much they cost, how easy they are to replace, etc., before you decide to buy.

Talk it over with your wine supply merchant and any winemakers you know. Everyone has a different opinion about filtering.

Up to a few years ago, some filter pads for some systems contained asbestos. This may or may not be a concern to you. I drink commercial wines, which at one point all used pads with asbestos and still may. I haven’t keeled over yet, but what about later?

CASKS AND BARRELS

Ah, the images that come to mind when one says the word winery! Dark, mysterious barrels of aged wood bound by sturdy
hoops lined up in some subterranean cavern lit by guttering beeswax candles, perhaps graced by the silent presence of a hooded monk…secret passages to the throne room…men in lace jabots leaping from cask to cask with flashing swords…lurking anarchists conferring secretly, plotting to overthrow who knows what…lovers meeting at midnight for that precious stolen kiss…etc.

Yeah. But.

Barrels are large and expensive. They can go bad in a day once the wine is out of them. Any mold or vinegar is there to stay! They have to be treated very carefully, and you have to keep a serious eye on the wine, because both the alcohol and the water content evaporate. Buying used barrels is a tricky business, unless you know and trust the person you are buying them from.

You can buy small wooden barrels, but the evaporation problems gets worse the smaller they are. Nope, just not worth it, I would say.

If you merely want the oak taste you get from oak barrels, you can use oak chips, sticks, or a liquid extract in your red wines.

Or buy half an old whiskey cask at the plant nursery, turn it upside down in your cellar, put a candle in the middle and some little log seats around it and use it for atmosphere and a tasting table. Much less risk and work.

If you are really serious, then you’ll just have to do it. Truth be told, using wine barrels is becoming more popular as more people get serious about small-scale winemaking. As the popularity of barrels grows, materials will get cheaper and methods will become more standardized.

GRAPE OR FRUIT CRUSHERS

If you plan to make a lot of grape or apple wine from scratch, year after year, you need a crusher. A grape crusher is different from an apple crusher. Buy the best one you can afford, and ask the advice of a clerk at your wine supply place, or someone else who knows. There are some cheap crushers on the market that do not work well. Always buy from a wine supply source rather than a garden catalog.

You can club together with friends to purchase one of these. Sometimes you can rent one from a local wine supply place, as
well. A good crusher is a blessing if you are making more than ten gallons of grape or apple must at a time. Besides, its presence will save you from giving into the temptation to put the grapes in a big tub and stomp on them while singing charming European folk songs. Remember what happened to Lucy and Ethel?

FRUIT PRESS

There are also grape presses and apple presses. They press the juice from the fruit you just crushed! The cautions apply here as above.

CHAPTER TEN

Advanced Wines

C
ombination wines comprise single fruit or vegetable wines that are enhanced with spice, herbs, flowers, or citrus; duos (two fruits mixed in fairly equal proportion); tutti-fruttis (many fruits mixed together with one or two flavors dominating); and “generic” reds and whites, in which no single flavor dominates.

These are some of the types of wines we are going to explore next.

SPICES

I haven’t really talked about spices until now because some people get a bit overenthused about them, and it’s easy to spoil a wine by adding too much spice.

Spices offer a good means of enhancing a basic fruit wine. Usually these wines work better as an aperitif for casual sipping or on social occasions. It’s truly impressive what you can come
up with—there won’t be anything in the wine stores like it, that’s for sure.

From Roman times all the way up to Victorian times, many wines were heavily spiced if the host could afford it. Sometimes this was meant to show off the wealth of the host, since spices were exotic and expensive. Sometimes it was to cover up the fact that the wine was either inferior to start with or beginning to turn into vinegar.

People also thought of spices as medicines. Spices were usually added just before serving, although there are many old mead and fruit wine recipes that call for the addition of spices during fermentation. In one I found, I was amazed that the recipe writer remembered to include the apples for which the recipe was named. It seemed almost like an afterthought.

Spices give wine a feeling of warmth as well as flavor. In some of the stately homes and castles in northern Europe, anything that gave the feeling of warmth, even in the heat of summer, was welcome, I’m sure. Those thick stone walls hold in the cold for months.

Today we take spices for granted, and that’s a pity. There is much history and flavor in them.

SPICE WINES

Mostly, I use spices to flavor a bland fruit or vegetable wine such as pear or apple. However, some people like to use spices to make single-flavor wines. To do so, follow the herb wine recipe given in Basic Herb or Flower Recipe, but use only an ounce of the whole spice. Ginger is an exception; you need to use 4 to 8 ounces of the freshly grated root. Do not use powdered spices. They go stale easily and are hard to clear. Use fresh whole spices only.

To use spice as an added ingredient, bruise the whole spice with the flat of a sturdy knife blade and add it to the contents of the nylon straining bag. If you will not be using a nylon straining bag, heat the spice with the sugar and water, then strain the spice out before adding the yeast.

P
EPPERCORNS

Peppercorns are wonderful. I learned how to use them in wine from a book by Mettja C. Roate published in 1963.

Ten bruised peppercorns do not so much add flavor as lend a warmth. I frequently leave them in the straining bag when making beet or carrot wine. I’ve read that pepper was used by moonshiners to warm up their product and make people think it was higher in alcohol than it actually was. If this is true, it probably also helped to mask the off flavors from bad distilling and no aging.

C
ASSIA

Cassia buds are another winner in my estimation. Cassia tastes like cinnamon. In the United States most cinnamon you encounter will be made from cassia buds. These buds add a hint of spice to blueberry, blackberry, and apple wine. I’ve also used them (ten to twenty or so at a time) in carrot and potato wine.

C
INNAMON

Cinnamon bark can be used if you are sure it is fresh. Otherwise it tastes just like wood. It has a sharper, sweeter flavor than cassia. Warning: I have seen some cinnamon bark for sale in craft stores that is impregnated with artificial cinnamon flavor. Don’t use this! Buy only from a reputable spice merchant or co-op.

G
INGER

Fresh stem ginger is another one I use a lot. You can add as little as a half ounce grated to perk up a wine, or as much as 8 ounces to really really add a kick to apple, peach, carrot, or meads. Ginger is warm, and, well, gingery. In cooking we use it as both a sweet spice and a pungent one. You can do the same in winemaking.

C
LOVES

Cloves are easy to overuse. Use a few to help things along once in a while, or with other spices such as cinnamon and ginger.

The same goes for allspice, nutmeg, and other “sweet” spices.

S
TAR
A
NISE

Star anise has a very strong flavor, rather like licorice. Be careful how you use it, but DO use it. Lightly crush one or two of the “stars.” They can add a lot of character to a potato or grain wine.

V
ANILLA

I have seen recipes for vanilla wine, but I’ve never made it. I should think that if you used apple as a base, 4 ounces of vanilla extract or a couple of actual vanilla beans cut up and added to the contents of the nylon straining bag would do the trick. Once or twice I have added a drop or two of vanilla to my wines, and I liked it. This might be something to try with a wine that needs a little help. Pour a glass and add a drop of vanilla and decide if you like it or not.

Do NOT use artificial vanilla flavoring.

O
THER
S
PICES

Coriander and cardamom and juniper berries are useful in small amounts. It depends on your taste. Juniper is the dominant flavor in gin, for instance. Gin wine is a favorite old-fashioned “country” wine.

W
HOLE
S
PICE
M
IXTURES

Try using mixtures of spices in their whole forms, like the spices used for apple pie—cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove—or the mixture used in pumpkin pie—cinnamon, ginger, and allspice. I’ve always wanted to do pumpkin wine with pumpkin pie spices.

Use the basic pea pod recipe with peeled cucumbers, add fresh dill, a little garlic, and pickling spices, and you might have dill pickle wine. I don’t know. Maybe it’s time I found out!

There are also some nice combinations, tried and true, in French cooking, like quatre epice, which is mostly white peppercorns with a touch of nutmeg, cloves, and ginger.

Vermouth is an aperitif wine that is made with various herbs. One recipe I found included the following: 5 parts wormwood (not advised by me! This stuff isn’t good for you!), 1 part balm, 1 part gentian, ¼ part yarrow, angelica root, chamomile, tonka bean, and a pinch each of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and thyme. There is no reason why you can’t start out with a glass of plain white wine of some kind, add spices, let it sit a while, and think about trying it in a whole gallon.

With experimentation and careful tasting, you can come up with
some very interesting wines. Remember that subtlety is usually more successful than bravado.

I don’t recommend mustard, bay leaves, sesame (nice flavor, too much oil), horseradish, turmeric, or fenugreek, but again, some people might like them.

Go easy with spices. Use them as accents. Don’t overwhelm a perfectly good wine with a heavy hand. I used to know a person who was basically a good cook, but who gradually seemed to lose her sense of taste. People began to shy away from her dinner parties, which, up to that point, had been very popular. I remember one pheasant dish in which she proudly told us she had used a whole jar of juniper berries.

She shouldn’t have gone to the expense of adding the pheasant. We couldn’t taste it for the juniper. It was like eating a juniper-flavored sponge.

There are spice oils on the market, like cinnamon oil, clove oils, etc. I’ve never used these in wines, but I see no reason you couldn’t, if you were careful about not adding too much. Use only the ones specifically marked for consumption, NOT for perfumes.

SPICED APPLE WINE

A basic recipe to work from. Nice for sipping on cold autumn evenings. Good in cider punch, as well.