Making Wine

My latest endeavor has just been set into motion: I'm making my own wine. A friend of mine, Brenda, made a batch of Vidal last year, and she gave me a bottle of it for xMas, which planted the seed in my mind.

I went with her this past weekend to pick up my supplies, and I decided I'd be making a "Chateau d'Andrew" Cabernet Sauvignon, vintage 2001. You can either buy the specific grape for the type of wine you want, and mash it yourself into "must" (liquified grapes, with skins and stems intact), and eventually strain it into a juice for making wine, or you can just buy the juice that's been pre-strained (and no, store-bought juice will not do for this). I decided to do the latter, because although making a mess stomping grapes sounded like a lot of fun, cleaning up said mess definitely didn't.

I also decided that since I'm making a red, I might as well go all the way and pick up a real oak barrel for aging the wine in. It's a bit more work to keep clean, but aging wine in oak barrels gives them a bit more character (adding a nutty/spicy taste and fuller body) than just aging them in glass or metal containers.

In theory, if all goes well, I'll need to "rack" the wine a few times (siphoning it from one vessel to another, and killing a bit of the yeast each time), then let it age for 6-7 months, and I'll either have 10 gallons of wine, or 10 gallons of some really, really expensive vinegar. Either way, I'll have enough of the stuff to fill 48 bottles, so everyone on my list will be getting some wine or some vinegar for Christmas. :)

I bought the juice in big 6 gallon sealed mylar bags, then balanced the sugar and acidity levels, sterilized all of my equipment (this stage is vital if you expect your wine to come out), and then poured the juice into a big 10 gallon "carboy" (it looks like a big water cooler bottle). Sounds easy, right?

Well just try handling 6 gallons of liquid (a liquid which stains quite readily, I might add) in a bag that's rather hard to hold onto, and then pouring it into a little funnel without making a catastrophic mess. The bag of juice weighs nearly 60lbs, which wouldn't be so bad, except it's as slippery as a greased pig (not that I'd I know how slippery a greased pig is, mind you), so I opted to try to do all of this mixing in the bathtub in case of spillage.

Whether this turns out as planned or not, I'm having a fun time doing it -- it really isn't all that much work, and learning about the process of wine making is very interesting, too. I definitely recommend giving it a go if you're the least bit interested.

2/4/2001 -- 1:30am -- Amazingly, all of the pouring/mixing went smoothly -- I've got 10 gallons of cabernet sauvignon grape juice in a "carboy" sitting in my bedroom. I then mixed the yeast culture up in warm water, and added it to the juice, putting a cotton ball in the mouth of the container to let it breathe, but keep dust and other contaminants out. The yeast eats the sugar in the grape juice, converting it to alcohol in the process -- all I do now is wait for 3-5 days until the "violent fermentation" stops (the frothing/bubbles die down).

2/5/2001 -- 3:45pm -- I checked my wine-to-be before I left for work today, and it had a good inch or two of froth on the top of it, which is a good sign that the yeast is throwing a little party in my grape juice. They are chowing down on the sugar like good little yeasties, and spitting out alcohol as a by-product. If you put your ear to the neck of the bottle, you can actually hear the bubbling fairly clearly. Very cool, all system's go so far!

2/5/2001 -- 6:45pm -- woah! I stopped in at my apartment briefly before going to the gym, only to discover that my yeasties are having a regular block-party orgy in the grape juice! The frothing was up over the top of the "carboy", tinted slightly purple from the cabernet grape juice, so it looks a lot like cotton candy. I slid some plastic under the carboy to catch any spills; if this keeps up, by tomorrow they'll be erupting like a mini volcano!

2/6/2001 -- 12:32am -- As I get ready to go to sleep, I can't help but think "who could have known that fermenting wine would smell so... well... 'special'."

2/6/2001 -- 10:30am -- Well, it looks like Mt. Vino did indeed erupt last night. When I woke up this morning, streaks of dried grape juice froth were all down the side of the "carboy"; the effect was reminiscent of a drip candle. Unfortunately, this also meant that there was a good sized puddle of spilled over grape juice on the floor (luckily caught by the garbage bag I put down). The guide says when the "violent fermentation" stops, that it's time to go onto the next stage, and since the frothing had indeed subsided, I figured it was time to dance! I cleaned up a bit, and then attached a rubber stopper and an "airlock" to the top of the carboy, which lets air out (as a pressure release for the carbon dioxide that builds up as fermentation continues) but not back in again. Unless something particularly exciting happens (like I come home and the whole mess has exploded, coloring my bedroom and cats a bright and pungent purple), I just leave it like this for 1-2 weeks (until no bubbles are released by the airlock in a 10 minute time period). It's hurry up and wait time!

2/7/2001 -- 11:05pm -- There's really not much left to do for the next two weeks or so. Right now the "carboy" is stoppered with a rubber cork that has a water-filled airlock on it, allowing the carbon dioxide that's a side-effect of the fermentation process to be released, but not allowing any air back into the container. This airlock is a fairly vital step; if you just stopper the sucker up, the pressure built up by the slow fermentation process would turn your wine-to-be into a ticking wine-bomb. I did lug the whole thing to the bathtub, though, so I could rinse off the dried wine froth from the eruption of Mt. Vino the other day. Maybe that'll help alleviate the stench that's been permeating my apartment lately (and no, it's not my dirty laundry!)

(I've been asked to take some pictures of this whole thing; there really isn't that much interesting to see, but maybe I'll take a picture of the "carboy" and my oak barrel -- we shall see)

2/8/2001 -- 9:02pm -- Pictures have been posted (the links to them are are at the top of this page) -- enjoy! Don't expect any updates for about 10 days or so (oh, no, what ever will you do?!?!).

3/30/2001 -- 10:05pm -- It took my wine a bit longer than I'd thought it would to be ready for the first racking (the instructions say to wait until there are 10 minutes between bubbles going through the air lock), but that day finally arrived! Brenda came over and helped me rack the wine, which basically means sterilizing all of the equipment again (the barrel, funnel, and siphon), then siphoning the wine from the carboy into the barrel (temporarily), then cleaning the carboy out, and siphoning it back.

Everything went pretty smoothly -- we decided to do the siphoning in the kitchen, hoping some wine would spill on the floor so that I'd be forced to mop the kitchen floor (it's badly in need of it). Sucking the siphon to start the flow of wine from the carboy to the barrel, I got my first taste of the wine. It tasted pretty damn good -- it's still a bit on the sweet side (but as it continues to ferment, it should become a bit drier), but it's definitely alcoholic, and it actually tastes like a decent cabernet currently (though of course, a very immature one).

There was a nice pasty sedement of dead yeast and other unmentionables in the bottom of the carboy, which we rinsed out rather completely. Interestingly enough, I'd kept water in the barrel for the entire time the wine was fermenting, and when I drained it, you could definitely notice the nutty/oaky flavor of the water.

It'll be interesting to see how much of the sweetness goes away in the next few months of aging, and also, how much of a nutty flavor/character it will gain from the final aging in the barrel. Nothing much should happen for another 1.5-2 months, then I rack it again, cold-stabilize it, then one more racking -- but this time into the barrel for the final aging!

We're one step closer to wine (and not vinegar!)

6/4/2001 -- 10:45pm -- Today my lovely assistant Brenda (actually, she's the boss -- she's the one who got me started on this whole wine thing) came over to help me do my second racking. Racking just means transferring the wine from one container to another, sterilizing it along the way, and eliminating any sedment that may have accumulated.

We got a good taste of the wine this time around by taking the liberty to pour ourselves a nice glass of it. We charactize the flavour (albeit immature) as "plumby" -- and Brenda says (as she swirls the wine around in the glass) that it has damn fine legs, too (insert cat-call whistle here).

While the wine was siphoning from the carboy into the barrel, we opened up a bottle of Los Vascos, a Chilean wine that my friend Matt generously donated at the last minute. The Los Vascos is destined to "top off" the wine -- when you rack wine, you always lose a little bit of it (especially when you drink it like we did), so you use a bottle of similar wine to fill up the container so that there is no air to spoil the wine.

The Los Vascos tastes very peppery -- and it definitely was oak-aged, the nutty/woody flavour is quite evident. I love that nutty/woody taste, and with that in mind, from now on, my wine is going to be aging in the barrel, not the carboy. Hopefully it'll gain some of that flavour over the next few months as it ages in my nice cute little barrel.

All that's left to do is haul the wine down into the basement (it needs to be in a cold place to do the cold stabilization), one more racking, and then it's time to bottle some wine! Hopefully the wine is done fermenting, because we just corked the barrel (there's no air lock anymore) -- if not, well, the basement will be covered with half-done wine when my barrel explodes.

9/24/2001 -- 8:00pm --ahhh, the final racking! I was a bit nervous about this one, because it was the first time the wine had spent time in the oak barrel, and there was some wine leaked around the cork. From what I understand, that's normal -- keeping the cork wet is what keeps the seal intact.

More troubling, though, was that some mold had formed around the cork where the wine leaked out a bit. As long as it didn't get inside, this is no big deal (and indeed, expected, given the sugar content of the wine).

With great expectation and a bit of trepidation, Ali (my new roomate) and I wedged the cork free, and siphoned the wine out to rack it. Thankfully, the wine is not only fine, it is damn fine! Of course, I'm completely biased because this is my wine, but compared to the $12 filler Cabernet we used to top it off, I like mine better!

I really wish I had more time to leave it in the oak barrel to age it; I really do love that nutty/oaky taste, especially in my reds -- but alas, there are constraints, namely, Christmas. I want to start bottling my wine in late December, so I can have it ready for xMas gifts.

Now I just need to get myself some custom labels, and start cleaning the wine bottles I've accumulated for re-use. Barring any disaster, the next update is gonna be the wine bottling party!

12/23/2001 -- 8:30pm -- The time has arrived, a scant few days before Christmas! I had my friends save their wine bottles as they drank them -- thankfully with my friends, it didn't take long to accumulate the 40 or so bottles I'd need for my wine. I ended up filling up my tub with soap and hot water, then letting the bottles sit in it overnight to get the labels off (much to the chagrin of my roommate, who wanted to shower).

The next step was to sterilize the bottles with the metasulphide tablets. If you don't sterilize *everything* while you're making wine -- especially the bottles the wine may be stored in for some time -- you stand a very good chance of ending up with vinegar rather than vino.

I then dragged everything into the kitchen, and proceeded to make a huge mess. I siphoned the wine from the oak barrel it had been aging in into each bottle -- to stem the flow of wine while it went from one bottle to another, I drank the excess. By the time I was on bottle 30 or so, I realized I was quite drunk.

The race was then on to finish bottling the wine before I got too plastered to care what happened. I boiled and sterilized the corks, and then used a funky little contraption to compress the corks and squeeze them into the bottle.

All in all, the bottling was the most intensive part of the wine making process, but it was also the most fun -- partly because I was done with the wine, and it came out well, and of course, partly because I was drinking it! I took a few bottles of it to a party Brenda had, and it seemed well-received (and I ended up getting quite sloshed on it).

I ended up with over 40 bottles of wine -- if you're expecting one, don't worry, you'll get it soon!

So how is the wine? Pretty damn good actually. It isn't that dry of a cab -- somewhere between sweet and dry, with a bit of the flavor of the local Concord grape we have here in upstate NY. It's definitely very drinkable now, right out of the bottle. I'm saving 10 bottles, and trying on each year to see how well it ages, and how the character of the wine changes.

The whole wine experiment was fun, and a resounding success. I'm quite sure I'll be trying to make some other types of wine (perhaps a white) soon! I've posted some pictures from the whole wine bottling mess (thanks for mopping, Mole!) for your browsing pleasure, at the top of the page.

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Other strange adventures, stories, and pictures can be found here. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at: andrew@AmbrosiaSW.com

Andrew Welch / el Presidente / Ambrosia Software, Inc.