I never heard from her and I forgot about the whole thing until I saw some apple juice at Trader Joe’s the other day. I hadn’t made a new batch of wine in a while, so I grabbed it from the shelves on impulse – I was going to make apple wine! Then I remembered.

Since a lot of people miss the conversations in the comments, I decided to update it a little and make it a top level post.

Here is Leslie’s Apple Wine Recipe:

To each gallon apple juice add three cups boiled-then-cooled sugar syrup (dissolve 3 cups sugar in 1.5 cups boiling water), one teaspoon acid blend, one teaspoon pectic enzyme, and one crushed campden tablet (or equivalent). Sprinkle a packet of Red Star Premier Cuvee, or other wine yeast of your choice, over the must.

Stir daily. You should notice fermentation in a couple of days. Once it has fermented out (a week or two), transfer to airlocked glass jugs/carboys. Top with other wine, or if you have to, water so that there is no more than one inch of room between the stopper and the wine. In a month or two, you should notice sediment has fallen. Rack into a clean airlocked glass jug/carboy. Add a new crushed campden tablet (or equivalent) every other time your rack.

When the wine stops throwing sediment, it’s ready to bottle. If you want it sweet, stabilize and sweeten according to your taste. If you just don’t know how much to sweeten, start with 3 tablespoons sugar/gallon of wine.

Ingredients for one gallon

This scales up easily. Want to make five gallons? Multiply everything, except the yeast, by five. Three gallons? Multiply by three.

• 1 Gallon Apple Juice
• 3 Cups Sugar
• 1.5 Cups Water
• 1 Teaspoon Acid Blend
• 1 Teaspoon Pectic Enzyme
• 1 Packet Yeast

Equipment you will need:

A primary fermenter, this is what you put everything in at first. A food grade 2-gallon bucket with a lid (not air tight, just to keep the dust and bugs out) works great for 1-gallon of wine that is fermented on skins and/or pulp. An airlocked 3-gallon carboy does the job too, while protecting juice-only fermentation from air. A 6-Gallon Carboy is just the thing for larger batches up to five gallons.

Two secondary fermenters. These are usually glass jugs or carboys that you can close with an airlock. One-gallon jugs work great for 1-gallon of wine. Why two? So that you have a place to siphon your fermenting/aging wine into.

Extra glass bottles that you can close with airlocks (wine bottles, beer bottles, and so forth). You’ll need these for wine that doesn’t fit when you rack.

Racking cane and siphon hose. You should siphon the wine from one container to the next so that it doesn’t splash and pick up too much oxygen.

A Stirring Spoon. I like stainless steel because they’re easy to sanitize by boiling; 14″ is a good size for 1-gallon batches.

No preservative in the apple juice

It’s very important that the apple juice have no preservatives – look for “pasteurized” and “no preservatives” on the label. If you see “sorbate” or “benzoate” on the ingredients, don’t buy it. It’s not that these things will do you any harm, but they will prevent the yeast from doing their work.

How to subscribe to the comments

A lot people know they can subscribe to the posts and be kept up to date automatically. But some posts generate a lot of conversation in the comments – most of this goes unnoticed. You can stay in the loop, whether it’s a reply to your question, somebody else’s question, or something totally new, by subscribing to the comments.

Remember when Sawyer was held at the Hydra station? Remember the fish biscuits? I’m not sure what a fish biscuit is, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to eat one. The Lady of the House makes Tuna Burgers. Great comfort food, they’re not really burgers but they’re served hot on homemade hamburger buns. They’re easy to make, and we love them. I’ve renamed them “Fish Biscuits!”

And the wine? Here I have a dilemma. I want something I really like – my simple mead recipe turned out great (took really well to oak – is aging beautifully) and I think it would go well with the fish biscuits. I’d also like a wine with a Dharma label, and that would be my wine from supermarket grapes. Unfortunately the label is the best thing about that wine. I could relabel one bottle of the mead, and I might do that. I could “have my wine and drink it too” by opening both bottles. Probably not. Maybe we’ll open the mead, and the Dharma wine will just show up for a photo op with the fish biscuits.

So I haven’t nailed down all the details, but we’ll have good food, good mead, and watch the finale of Lost. It’ll be fun!

I’ll never forget my first mistake

I don’t know how he’d feel about me relaying his story of how he lost 5 gallons of promising wine, but fortunately (?) I’ve made plenty of my own mistakes. My very first wine got off to an exciting start, and I checked in on it hourly. I worried and doted over every step. Did I add just the right amount of tannin? The right kind? How about acid? Should I have used a different yeast? It’s been hours since I pitched the yeast – how come it’s not fermenting yet?!?! I needn’t have worried about any of that and not just because it was destined to come crashing down – literally – and spread out over the floor as it flowed over and around the shards of broken glass.

I was laser-focused on some important details

Nope. None of the those things mattered one bit. And I now know they wouldn’t have mattered even if I had been paying attention to my entire setup during the First Racking. It wasn’t just the first time that particular wine would be racked (siphoned from one container into another) it was the first time I had ever siphoned anything. So it was a big deal and I was determined to Do It Right. That meant no splashing. The whole point of siphoning is to transfer the wine without incorporating oxygen into it, so I was very intent on the end of the siphon hose – getting it into the receiving vessel quickly and smoothly, getting (and keeping) it submerged as quickly as possible, and keeping the vessel stable to it didn’t agitate the wine. I wasn’t wrong about any of that, and I did them all pretty well. I just left out a thing or two that proved to be important.

But overlooked one or two others

Like making sure the siphon hose was long enough for the height of my counter and the size of the 1-gallon jugs I was using. And keeping in mind that tugging on the (slightly too short) hose to get it and keep it submerged didn’t just reduce splashing but also pulled on the jug of fermenting wine sitting on the edge of the counter just above me. And that just because it didn’t fall right away didn’t mean that, as the racking progressed, the constant tug of the siphon hose wouldn’t overcome the (steadily falling) weight of fermenting wine holding the jug in place.

Everyone makes mistakes

It would have been helpful to learn all of those things a litter earlier than I did – yeah, that would have been great. Instead the 1-gallon jug with about half a gallon of fermenting wine came down with a … well I don’t remember exactly what it sounded like. I just remember being snapped out of whatever I was thinking about, which was probably how great the siphoning was going (no splashing here!), to find myself barefoot, wearing shorts, and sitting cross legged on my kitchen floor surrounded by shards of glass (from really big to really small and everything in between) and about half a gallon of fermenting wine spreading out over the floor.

The trick is to learn the right lessons

That was, um, discouraging. But I survived (I don’t know how, but literally without a scratch) to make wine another day. The remarkable thing is that I’m still learning from that all these years later. Yes, I make sure about the length of my siphon hose and that jugs and carboys are secure as I siphon from them. But today I realized the most important lesson is to develop an efficient and reliable procedure for each step in your wine making. Things like racking, bottling, testing, making up a must should all have a tried and true checklist – literally a written list of every item you will need and every step you will take. No more discovering at the last minute that the racking cane’s foot didn’t get sanitized or that you don’t have enough containers of the right size for all the wine your’re going to rack, or … anything. Each of these processes are simple enough that we ought to be able to do them the same way each time. No surprises, no mistakes, so the excitement in homemade wine can come from how it tastes.

How to make apple cider

I liked it so much that it got me thinking about how to make apple cider. At it’s most basic, it’s just fermented apple juice. In principle, you could just obtain some juice (from the store, a roadside stand, grinding and pressing your own apples, or what have you) and pitch the yeast. Like most everything else, though, there are some details you should attend to. Make sure the juice has no preservatives (other than sulfite), the specific gravity of a clear sample is between 1.045 to 1.065 (add sugar if it’s too low), and the acidity is between 3-5 g/L as malic.

I normally measure acidity as though all the acid were tartaric, but the acidity in apples is almost all malic and cider makers often report TA as malic. To convert, multiply by 1.1193. That gives a range of 3.4 – 5.6 g/L, as tartaric.

You can use the Wine Recipe Wizard to help with additions. I’ve made wine from 1-gallon jugs of apple juice you see in grocery stores (Trader Joe’s sells them in glass jugs for less than home brew shops sell empty 1-gallon jugs) and that would be a great way to start making cider.

It’s a lot like apple wine, but with less alcohol. Like wine it can be sweet, dry, or anywhere in between. Cider is often carbonated, but it doesn’t have to be. Try it!

Apple cider, juice, and wine

There’s some confusion about the word, so let me tell you what I mean when I say “cider.” If you start with apples, grind them and press them you have apple juice. To me, it doesn’t matter if it’s filtered, cloudy, pasteurized, or preserved – it’s still apple juice. If you take that juice and ferment it, you’ve got cider. If, on the other hand, you add sugar to bring the potential alcohol up to wine strength and ferment it, then you’ll get apple wine.

Further reading

Some good books and websites with more info on cider and how to make it:

Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider by Annie Proulx – yes, that Annie Proulx. Before she became famous she wrote this great book on cider!

Cider, Hard and Sweet by Ben Watson

Craft Cider Making by Adrew Lea – He learned about Cider from his time at the UK’s Long Ashton Research Station.

The Wittenham Hill Cider Pages – Andrew Lea’s cider website

We have three different kinds of wine glasses: clear stems, blue stems, and red stems. When we want to do a quick tasting, We each pour up to three different wines into each kind of glass while the other is out of the room, note which is which, and then leave the room. We don’t know what we’re tasting as we scribble down our impressions of the “clear” wine or the “blue” wine. We only tell each other after we’re done sniffing, swirling, spitting, clearing our palates, and writing down what we think. Yes, I know what she’s tasting and she knows what I’m tasting, so it’s not double blind – that’s the price for a quick and easy setup. It’s not much of a price, though, because we’re both pretty focused on the wine in front of us.

Describing a wine

If you’re not a trained taster, it can be hard to know what to say about a wine. This is where comparing two of them side by side can help. The aroma: is one stronger than the other? Are they both strong or faint? Write that down. Do they differ in some way? Write that down – even if you have a hard time describing exactly how – “they differ in a way I can’t describe” is better than making something up or not writing down anything at all. Do the same thing for flavor (stronger, fainter, different) and make note of any familiar tastes that you notice (it’s ok if you don’t notice any or can’t describe them – the more you do this the better you’ll get). Pay attention to acidity (too much will seem tart, not enough will be flabby, and just right will feel lively), tannin (with soft tannins you’ll notice a drying sensation in your mouth, harsh tannins are bitter) and sweetness (does it taste sweet or not? is it too sweet?).

Clearing your palate

You might notice that flavors and aromas become more muted after you’ve been tasting for a while. It’s a bit like tuning out a steady sound – after a while you just don’t notice it. That’s why tasters clear their palate between different wines. A cracker or an apple will give your taste buds something different and “reset” them for the next wine. Sniffing some coffee beans or some such can do the same for your sense of smell.

Isn’t it supposed to be fun?

I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it can really turn something ordinary into an occasion. It isn’t just that you learn more about how wines differ or which ones go with which food, it’s that you have something new to talk about at dinner. Sometimes the Lady of the House and I agree on the wines, and other times it’s as though we were tasting completely different ones. There’s often a surprise and always something to talk about. So spice up your next meal with an easy blind tasting!

Further reading

For a great book on how to taste wine, try How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine.

First some basics: One cup (240 ml) of raspberries weigh about 4.3 oz (123 grams).¹ Fresh raspberries keep best when stored cold, just above 32F (0C).² If you’re making wine and you have the space, then I recommend freezing – they not only keep well frozen, but the freeze/thaw process aids in extraction. One more thing: unlike grapes, the acid in raspberries is almost all citric.

What’s in raspberries?

Sugar content is hard to measure

The amount of fiber is interesting because it might explain why you can’t rely on your hydrometer to gauge sugar content in raspberries. Almost all the soluble solids in wine grapes are sugar, but they are only about 30% sugar in raspberries. Adding acid content to total sugar only gets us to 50%, on average⁴. So what’s the rest? Take another look at that fiber line. Some of that fiber, the USDA doesn’t say how much, is soluble fiber and would make up part of the soluble solids.

Making raspberry wine

What does all this mean? That raspberries are different from wine grapes in some important ways. Since most knowledge about wine making comes from making grape wine, we should start with those differences and how they might change our usual practices.

Because sugar is harder to measure in raspberries than grapes, you’re better off using an average value of 4.3 g/100g rather than a hydrometer or refractometer reading. Another big difference from grape wine is the high pectin content, so you should plan on a higher dosage of pectic enzyme – maybe 6x as much for the same weight. Finally, because each raspberry is a collection of many tiny berries, raspberries have a lot more skin and seed surface area than grapes. This means phenolic extraction will be very high, so I recommend juicing the raspberries and making the wine like a white or rose instead of fermenting on the skin.

So start with your juice. Measure the volume and titratable acidity (I’d expect around 16 g/L) and use 4.3 Brix (1.017 SG) as an approximate sugar content. Choose target values for alcohol and TA based on the style of wine your trying to make and your personal taste. Then determine the amount of sugar, water, and acid to add to your juice. I created the Wine Recipe Wizard just for this purpose.

If you’re making a dry wine, then all you have to do is make these additions and ferment to dryness. For a sweet wine stabilize and sweeten after your wine has cleared.

Sources

1) USDA National Nutrient Database Great information on the composition of many foods. I used the keyword “raspberries” and the food group “fruit & fruit juices,” and selected raw raspberries to find information for this post.

2) On Food and Cooking – Haraold McGee
An excellent book on the science of cooking. No recipes, but lots of information on ingredients, like raspberries and other fruits, and food chemistry. That makes it a great reference for the home winemaker as well as the home cook.

3) Documentation for USDA National Nutrient Database When you really want to know how the USDA determined the amount of fat in raspberries – or how and why they did anything in the nutrient database – look here.

4) Volatile Composition in Raspberry Cultivars Grown in the Pacific Northwest Determined by Stir Bar Sorptive Extraction-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry – Sarah M. M. Malowicki, Robert Martin, and Michael C. Qian
Measures the composition of raspberries grown in Washington in 2005. Includes good data on sugar, acid, and soluble solids.

5) Raspberries And Related Fruit – Dr. Marvin Pritts
Does not report direct measurments, but indicates that “typical” raspberries will weigh in at 9 Brix, which agrees with Malowicki et al, have a pH between 3.0 – 3.5, and will contain 5-6% sugar. That’s a higher sugar content than Malowicki but significantly less than if the soluble solids were 100% sugar.

6) Raspberry Wine Recipe – One of my own raspberry wines.

Notes and Further Reading

The Average Stats table is just me with a calculator trying to boil down the tables, ranges, and approximate values of my sources into a simple useful number. I have more ambition than time, and here are sources that I wanted to track down, but couldn’t for one reason or another:

• Boland, F.E., V. Blomquist, and B. Estrin. 1968. Chemical composition of fruits. J.A.O.A.C. 51: 1203.
  Chemical composition of strawberries, red raspberries, blackberries, black raspberries, boysenberries and cranberries is presented. Analysis included total soluble solids, ash, K2O, P2O5, invert sugar, protein, citric acid and amino acid.
• Leinback, L. R.; Seegmiller, C. G.; Wilbur, J. S. 1951. Composition Of Red Raspberries Including Pectin Characterization. Food Technology 5:51
• Spanos, G.A. and R.E. Wrolstad. 1987. Anthocyanin pigment, nonvolatile acid, and sugar composition of red raspberry juice. J. Assoc. Off. Anal Chem. 70(6): 1036.
• A link of sources

Great data on raspberries upends an old rule of thumb

I was checking university extension offices, googling, and looking anywhere I had found information on fruit composition before when I came across this great paper on raspberries. It’s got excellent data on sugar and acid content, and I highly recommend it if you’re interested in making raspberry wine. I want to zero in on the Brix and Total Sugar measurements:

Total Sugar is reported as grams per 100 grams, and if the soluble solids were 100% sugar, then Brix would equal Total Sugar. The last column, Sugar Brix Ratio, is my own calculation and expresses sugar as a percentage of soluble solids. I also reported average values in the last row.

We go from soluble solids being “almost all” sugar in wine grapes to less than 30% (on average) for raspberries! I asked Michael Qian, one of the authors, about this. He said that the data were good but some fruit, like raspberries and blackberries, just have a lot of pectin and other non-sugar soluble solids. I really appreciate him taking the time to help me out; I’m sure he’s a busy guy and this was a pretty basic question from someone outside his target audience (so, if you’re reading this – thank you!).

We know more than before – it just doesn’t feel like it

It’s exciting to learn something new, even if it does make things more complicated. When can we rely on our hydrometers? Wine grapes are probably a safe bet. Raspberries and blackberries are not. We need more information about other fruits, and I’ll be looking into that. If you know something about sugar content and soluble solids of other fruits, please say so in the comments.

Alright, what do we do when we know our hydrometers will read high? I don’t have a good solution yet. For raspberries, we might just adjust the reported Brix by 30% – still not accurate, but closer than the hydrometer reading. If you have an idea, I’d love to hear about it.

Jack Keller once said that a hydrometer is like a compass. Maybe it’s like a magnetic compass. It works well enough much of the time, but the question is, how do we find true north when we really need to?

Colony Collapse Disorder is real, we don’t know what causes it or how to treat it, and it’s causing losses and hardship for beekeepers. But each passing year of stable colony counts, this is the fourth, is another reason for optimism that CCD is not threatening our honey supplies or pollination capacity. News media coverage seems to be moving away from the shrill cries of “disappearance” and “extinction”, as in this ABC report on the declining incidence and severity of CCD over the 2008/2009 winter.

I make a lot of mead and buy honey in bulk. I’d like to keep doing that, so I’ve been following the CCD phenomenon ever since I heard about it. I’m also interested in production and and the outlook for honey prices. From that perspective, the rest of the honey report is a good news/bad news story.

More honeybees but less honey in 2009

In 2008 we saw managed colonies decline, but per colony yield and total honey production rise. 2009 gave us a mirror image of that with the number of colonies rebounding but producing less honey. Much less. In fact per colony yield was the lowest since 1989 and total US honey production was the lowest ever. That’s the bad news. The good news is that lower production didn’t lead to higher prices.

Honey prices up a bit, inventories down a lot

Producer honey stocks fell to 37.2 million pounds (16.9 million kg), down from 50.4 million pounds (22.9 million kg)a year ago – a 27% decline. My own honey price survey showed no change in 2009, and the USDA’s “all honey” price was up 2% to 144.5.

Revisions of 2008 data

It looks like the USDA has revised some of it’s 2008 data this year. The all honey price was originally reported to be 141.0 in the 2008 honey report, but is said to have increased from 142.1 in the 2009 report. Also, the number of producing honeybee colonies was originally reported to be 2.30 million at the end of 2008, but are said to have risen by 5% to 2.46 million at the end of 2009. The USDA does not provide a new figure for the 2008 colony count, but 2.46 million is about 7% higher than 2.30 million. So it looks like honey prices rose more, and the colony count fell less, than first reported in 2008. Since the USDA was not explicit about all these revisions, I use the data as reported in my table. After all, the 5% figure or the 142.1 could have been typos.

Further reading

The ABC news story that I mentioned was based on A survey of honey bee colony losses in the United States, fall 2008 to spring 2009.

I only pull the plug when a batch has undeniably gone south for eternity. That means a spoilage bacteria has crossed the Rubicon before I knew it existed

I can’t link to this particular post, so you’ll have to click through and search by date and/or title. Like most of his writing, it’s well worth reading the whole thing. Jack is an exceptional winemaker, and this rule might work really well for him. I came to a different conclusion, however, and I think most home winemakers should approach it as a cost-benefit trade off.

Benefit of saving wine

Some problems can be fixed for less time, trouble, and money than starting a new batch. That’s the strongest, most straightforward argument for trying to save a troubled batch. Moving a carboy from the cold basement to a warmer spot upstairs might be all it takes to get a stuck fermentation going again. Some infections can be nipped in the bud by gently floating off a telltale film from the surface, then immediately racking with a higher-than-normal dose of sulfite. If a batch can be saved by simple steps like these, why wouldn’t you? But there’s a gray area in between these easy fixes and the total losses that Jack talks about. The right choice there isn’t obvious, and depends on the specific problem and you own knowledge and resources.

Cost of trying too hard

Some wine and mead will not turn out well enough to justify the work of trying to save them. Every carboy, jug or bottle takes up space. I don’t know about you, but I’m not suffering from too much room for my hobby. Is your back getting stronger and better with age? How about cleaning – is that starting to grow on you? Me neither. We’ll drink better wine with less effort if we can identify and discard the batches that aren’t going to be worth it.

How to balance benefit and cost when evaluating your own wine? Here’s how I did it:

Hard choices and good decisions

I had been keeping an eye on those five batches because I had reasons to think each one might succumb to infection, oxidation, or some other fault. But when I decided to pour them down the drain, it wasn’t for any of the reasons I had been worrying about – I succeeded in saving all five batches. The problem was the taste. None of them tasted bad, or off, or unbalanced. They just didn’t excite me. I forced myself to think about how they stacked up against good budget wine that I’m familiar with. Given the choice, would I rather have a glass of the apple mead or Welch’s wine? The blueberry wine or Fetzer Cabernet? I make my own wine because I enjoy doing it and because I want something different (in a good way) from, or better than, what’s available commercially. I reluctantly decided that these five just didn’t make the cut.

What makes this decision so hard is that you have to make it with incomplete information. Keep good notes so that you know as much about the wine as possible, evaluate the wine as thoroughly as you can (including taste, smell, and visual inspection), then make the call. Take more notes on what you decided and why – like every other aspect of making your own wine, you’ll get better at it.

The Lady of the House Bought a Motorola Droid!

This is the first “smart phone” for the Washington Winemaker household, and we’re very excited about it. One thing we were really looking forward to was the navigation feature. It uses GPS, mapping data, and a voice synthesizer to give you spoken directions. We recently moved and we’re doing a lot of driving in unfamiliar territory. Well it works beautifully, exceeding our very high expectations, and it means that both of us are less anxious when the other goes somewhere alone. On top of that, we can access the internet from almost anywhere. Neither of us knew how valuable this was until we tried it; now we don’t want to be without it. All in all, the DROID is an expensive little gadget that’s worth every penny. Oh yeah, it’s a pretty good cell phone too.

I’ve seen the future and it is mobile

All this got me thinking about how we will use the web in the future, and I think these small mobile smart-phone/net book thingies are only going to become more popular. What would that mean for Washington Winemaker? When I first looked at this site with the Droid it was all there: the lovely header, the nav shortcuts in the sidebar, and it all worked. But it was a little awkward to read and use. In updating the site for mobile devices, I wanted to pick the low hanging fruit first and see how people liked it. Do you use a smart phone? Have you looked at this web site with it? What do you think? What other improvements are worth doing?

Well I best be going now. I don’t know how much more playing research and usability testing the Lady of the House will let me do before she takes it back.