From a starting gravity of about 1.090, it fermented out to 0.992 and I did not sweeten. I know a lot of people will want to sweeten, but I advise against it. Mainly because it’s very good as a dry wine, but also because I’m afraid that sweetening will bring out a “grape juice” flavor. In fact, if you’re making fruit wine and want it taste more of raspberries, strawberries, or whatever you made it from, sweetening will bring some of the that fruit flavor out. That can be a good thing, but not in this case.

It’s acidic, with titratable acidity (TA) of 7 g/L and pH of 3. It may not look like it from the numbers, but this dry acidic wine is easy to drink - even at five months old.

How much does Welch’s wine cost?

From time to time, the concentrate goes on sale for $1/can. When it does I buy 12 cans, add about 6 lb (2.75 kg) of sugar and water to six gallons (23 liters). This gets me at least 5 gallons (19 liters) of finished wine. Here are the details:

Less than $1/bottle! To simplify, I didn’t include the cost of yeast, acid, or nutrient. They would add a tiny bit to the cost. Using cheaper closures (bag in a box, crown caps) would push the cost down.

Every winemaker should make Welch’s wine

Keeping yourself stocked up on Welch’s wine means never having to worry about topping up. Come up a little short on today’s racking? Pop open one of these.

You can also use a wine like this to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth from other wine. Store bought or homemade, they all should pass this simple test. Is it convincingly better than this $1/bottle wine in a blind tasting? If not, then why spend $10 on that Chardonnay or $150 on that high end kit? Don’t get me wrong; some will be better, but now you’ll know which ones.

But it’s a good wine in it’s own right, and that’s the best reason to make it. Crisp but easy to drink, it’s a good simple wine that you’ll want to have on hand.

About the label

When I started making this wine the headlines were pretty dire. This wine went from fermentation to bottle in less than six months and it cost less than 1$/bottle - and that includes 35 cents for the cork. Throw in easy drinking good flavor and you’ve got the perfect wine for hard times. So I decided to call it “Bailout Blanc.”

To label a wine like that, I wanted artwork that conveyed the stress most people are feeling in a lighthearted way. There are lots of way to do that, but Ferrell McCollough’s photo Chris Overworked really stood out. The composition and the post processing come together perfectly, and he was gracious enough to let me use it on my label.

You see a larger photo of the bottle here.

Running the numbers

I’ll start with the usual analysis. Fetzer didn’t have information on the 2006 vintage, and they ignored my e-mail asking for it. They indicated 13.5% alcohol on the bottle and reported this for 2007:

13.49% Alcohol • Titratable Acidity (TA) 6.3 g/L • pH: 3.47 • RS: 0.6g/L (dry)

and here are my measurements of the 2006 vintage:

Specific Gravity (SG): 0.994 • pH: 3.5 • TA: 5 g/L

I like to include these measurements so you and I can compare them with our own homemade wine. If a commercial wine tastes particularly good and well balanced, I want to look at the measurements to see how they did it. The most important measurements, of course, are the ones you do with your nose and your palate. How did the Fetzer measure up?

Going back for more

Jason, I owe you one. This is a nice wine that’s great with pasta or steak on the grill. The Lady of the House and I enjoyed a bottle with dinner of ziti and meatballs. It would also make a terrific Superbowl wine. I don’t rate wines on a 100-point scale, but I can tell you that you get more than you pay for with this wine. I’m going back to buy more.

Canes or spurs?

Canes are just long “branches” of one year old wood with one or two dozen buds along their length. If they had just a few buds, four or so, then they would be a lot shorter and we would call them spurs. I had been spur pruning because it’s easier to take vines in and out of pots, while I trim their roots, without long fragile canes whipping about.

Letting the vine decide

Easier doesn’t get you very far if the varietal doesn’t bear fruit that way, so last year I pruned to canes. I was careful not to jostle them when I tended the vine, re-potted it, or just walked past it. Well it looks like it may have been worth the effort. I’ve noticed a few clusters on my Swenson Red and I’m looking forward to my first crop in three years!

About the label

LouGarou is a talented photographer, and he was kind enough to let me use his photo in my wine label. He’s taken many exceptional shots, but the warm tones in this one made it just the thing for my label - thanks Lou!

I labeled it “Sweet Cherry,” and included alcohol content, TA, pH, and final gravity. Instead of a vintage (not too many people are going to be raving about “Safeway’s 2007 Bing Cherries”) I put a date range. The first date is the day I started and the end date is the day I bottled. You’ll know how long it bulk aged, how long it’s had in the bottle, and yes, when the cherries were grown - that date range says a lot without saying a lot.

How does the cherry wine taste?

I think I managed to balance the wine. The acidity is noticable, but it’s lively and not too tart. Sweetness is there too, but people who “don’t like sweet wine” liked it and didn’t think it was too sweet. I don’t notice the astringency that comes from tannin. This makes it an enjoyable red table wine, but unlike the dry reds that I’m used to. The flavor and aroma are different as well. I wouldn’t say it “tastes like cherries,” but there is something familiar from tasting commercial cherry wine (yes, there is such a thing).

Thoughts on my next cherry wine

This was a learning experience, and I’ve got a to-do list for the next one.

• Use a yeast like Lavlin’s 71-B that consumes malic acid: since most of the acid in cherries is malic and I had trouble with too much acid, having the yeast remove some for me should make things easier.
• Learn more about dealing with high titratable acidity (TA) and high pH at the same time: I’ve been reluctant to use phosphoric acid to adjust the pH because it can be dangerous to handle. Maybe I need to get comfortable with that or find another way to manipulate the different facets of acidity.
• Learn more about cherries:  This is my second batch of cherry wine, and both batches had the high TA - high pH problem. Is it something about the variety of cherry (I used Bing each time)? how it’s grown? or are all cherries like that? I sense another know your ingredients post coming up.

Until then I’ll be enjoying my newly bottled cherry wine - cheers!

Sugar and acidity of rhubarb juice

So what does a winemaker need to know about rhubarb? The short answer is sugar and acid. Getting that right is the biggest part of any successful recipe. It turns out that rhubarb has a lot of acid and not much sugar. I juice the rhubarb and normally see measurments like this (these figure are from my most recent batch):

specific gravity (SG): 1.020, titratable acidity (TA): 14 g/L as tartaric, pH: 3.19

This agrees with Ben Rotter’s data:

SG: 1.020, TA: not enough data, pH: 3.17

Most of that acid, 70% or more, is malic.

Juice yield

A lot of people make rhubarb wine by fermenting on the fruit, and most recipes specify the amount of rhubarb by weight. To make sense of these recipes, or make wine with whole fruit, or to compare notes with other wine makers, you’ll need to know how much juice a given weight of rhubarb will yield. I got 515 ml (17.4 fl oz) of juice from 1.115 kg (2.5 lb) of fruit, or a yield of 462 ml/kg (7 fl oz/lb).

I froze the rhubarb, thawed it in a strainer and got 225 ml (7.6 fl oz) of “free run” juice. Then I lightly pressed, just squeezing with my hands, to get another 290 ml (9.8 fl oz). This is low compared to Mr. Rotter’s data (470 - 830 ml/kg). The pulp I discarded was wet, so I could have gotten more with a small press.

You know your own procedures better than I do. Do you efficiently squeeze the fruit leaving bone-dry pulp? Expect over 600 ml/kg (9.2 fl oz/lb). If you press lightly and leave wet pulp, then you’re more likely to get 500 ml/kg (7.7 fl oz/lb), give or take. Now we have some information on yield, sugar, and acidity. What can we do with these data?

The possibilities are endless

I normally make my rhubarb wine dry, and I can tell you it’s terrific that way. I’ve tasted sweet rhubarb wine that was fabulous. I’ve aged rhubarb wine over two years and noticed improvement. I’ve tasted 5+ year old rhubarb wine from the Montana Hutterites that was superb. I’ve heard that the Hutterites successfully age their wine for decades, and Ben Rotter aged a sweet rhubarb wine for 30 years, and it hadn’t past it’s peak. Many wine makers have found rhubarb to be an excellent blending wine.

This is what I mean when I say that rhubarb is versatile. That’s why no recipe can show you “what rhubarb wine tastes like”. To find out, you need to go beyond any one recipe and try different variations. Honey instead of sugar, sweet instead of dry, dry instead of sweet, high acid like a Riesling - and do set some bottles asid for extended ageing! While we’re on the subject of ageing, I wouldn’t recommend rhubarb as an early drinker. Even if you decide against extended ageing, you’ll want to give it at least a year.

Further reading

The Rhubarb Compendium - a good collection of rhubarb information
Improved Winemaking - Ben Rotter’s website - From his fruit data to ideas on wine styles, there’s a lot here for any winemaker

With ten grape vines in pots, and another ten fruit trees, I’ve been doing a lot of hand watering. It’s become quite a chore, so I’ve decided to put in a drip irrigation system. This will have water coming from a garden hose, through a pressure reducing fitting, into a feeder bottle so that I can fertilize, through a half-inch hose, and out of quarter-inch drip lines that run to each pot. Instead of a seemingly endless cycle of fill the watering can - water the vines/trees, I would just be able to turn on the water and go read a book. With a timer, I might not even have to turn the water on and off.

I had an abstract idea of what a drip system was and how it worked. What I needed was some hands on knowledge - what were the various components of a drip system? what did they do? how did they fit together? For a crash course in Drip Irrigation 101, I went to three hardware stores. I struck gold at Lowes with a clerk who had been a plumber and installed many a drip system. Now I have most of the equipment I need and a much better idea of how to put that equipment to use.

Basic equipment for a drip irrigation system

• half-inch tubing - delivers low pressure water to the drip system
• quarter-inch tubing - delivers water to an individual vine or tree
• 25 PSI Pressure Regulator - keeps pressure from overwhelming the system
• 3/4″ hose to 1/2″ tubing adapter - connects the system to a garden hose or tap
• quarter-inch double barbed connectors - connects quarter inch tubing to the half inch tubing
• 50 quarter-inch hole plugs - plugs holes in the half inch tubing

Other equipment that might be needed

• anti siphon device - prevents back flow from the drip system to the water supply
• filter - keeps dirt from clogging the drip system

You can buy this equipment at a garden center as a kit or as separate pieces. I had planned to buy a kit, and use it as a learning tool, but the clerk at Lowes assembled everything I needed for the system I had in mind. If all goes well, I’ll be putting it all together into a working drip irrigation system for use this summer.

Gathering data

I had some ideas about this, but wanted to get a clear picture of exactly how the final volume changed over time. I’ve been recording six final volume measurements at the same time intervals over the past two months. For example, on March 2, I tested my Merlot. The initial volume was 0.2 ml, and right after adding the sample I measured the final volume as 2.4 ml. At +5 minutes, +10 minutes, +15 minutes, +20 minutes, and +30 minutes I measured:

2.9 ml, 2.9 ml, 2.8 ml, 2.8 ml, and 2.7 ml

Since the initial volume is arbitrary, it’s more helpful to view the data as a difference from the initial volume or as a percentage of it. Here are the same data expressed as a percentage of the initial volume:

120.83%, 120.83%, 116.67%, 116.67%, and 112.50%

I ran this same test nine more times on different wines and musts. Here are the results expressed as a percentage.

On six occasions, the final volume rose (indicating more acid) five minutes after the initial measurement then fell over the next thirty minutes. Three times (the red text in the table), the final volume steadily fell after the initial reading. And during one test (indicated in gree), the final volume continued rising for fifteen minutes, then held steady. What’s going on? It doesn’t surprise me that the apparatus can’t hold pressure perfectly, so the gradual fall that I see in almost all the cases makes sense.

Am I just being impatient?

The rise in the first five minutes that I saw in most of the tests made me think that the chemical reaction between the acid and the baking soda was slower than I thought. That would explain six of the tests and sort-of explain that (green) one that rose for fifteen minutes and plateaued. But the three (red) tests that showed a steady decline just don’t fit.

Is it something in the water?

I drain the device after each use, and fill it with water just before a test. Most of the time I get water from my kitchen faucet, but sometimes I use a utility sink in the basement. Water is water, of course, but the kitchen faucet has an aerator on it and the utility sink does not. Could the aerated water from the kitchen be releasing air during the test and affecting the final volume? Might there have been some air bubbles in the tubing that I overlooked? That could explain all ten test results. Being especially quick with the test and using kitchen water (or not doing enough to dislodge all the air bubbles in the tubing) might have caused the fifteen minute rise in the green test. The six times that I saw a five minute rise might have been me going at a more normal pace, allowing some air to bubble out while I got ready for the test. Water from the utility sink would not have cause a rise at all, and that would dovetail nicely with the red tests.

Putting it to the test

I didn’t think that my water source would matter, so I didn’t make a note of it when I recorded my data. So I’m going to run more tests and collect more data. This time, I will leave the water in the apparatus between tests. This ought to insure that no air bubbles out and affects my results. If I get the same sort of results, then I can rule out the air in the water. If, on the other hand, all my tests show a gradual decline after the initial reading, like the red tests, then I think I may have solved this mystery.

Running the numbers

When I make wine at home, I measure the specific gravity, titratable acidity, and pH. I thought I’d start doing that for some of the commercial wine I buy to see how how the pros are balancing acid, alcohol, and sugar. Since some wineries publish an analysis of their wines, it’ll also give me a chance to see how my measurments compare to those of a commercial lab.

The alcohol content is 13.9%, according to the label, and here are my measurements:

SG: 0.990, pH: 3.34, TA: 4.4 g/L

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an analysis for this wine, and my e-mail to Kirkland Signature Wine Connection went unanswered. So I’ll just have to go on what I have, and what I have is a low TA - I would have expected 6 g/L or so. Ok, but how does it taste?

Disappointing

“Not unpleasant,” said the Lady of the House. We both hoped for more. There is promise, as you begin to sip, a hint of something lively. It’s gone the moment you swallow, however, and that short finish makes it a plain, disappointing wine. Next time I’ll pass on this one and pick up the Sauv Blanc or head over to Trader Joe’s for some Panilonco 2008 Reserve Chardonnay/Voignier.

A good label on a clean bottle, without scuff marks of the previous label on it, is part of that presentation. It should be attractive and informative. An informative label answers questions about it. You don’t have a lot of room on the label so make sure you cover the basics, like “what am I drinking?” and “is it sweet or dry?” If you’re serving to other winemakers, then measurements like specific gravity (SG), titratable acidity (TA), and pH might be important. Attractive labels make people feel good about the wine and want to try it (and if the CIT results can be applied here, make it “taste better”).

The Image: Tell a story

My labels are usually text on artwork. I try to choose artwork that reflects the wine in some way. This relationship between the label and the wine can make a nice story to tell your guests as you serve the wine. That can mean showing the base fruit of the wine on the label - one of my apple wine labels featured a woman eating an apple. It can mean color and mood coming together the way a fun pinup of a woman blushing became the artwork for my “Raspberry Blush” wine. It almost certainly means different things to different people. To me, wine and mead are feminine so most of my labels are too - though I did use a self portrait on my first wine from grapes and the Dharma Initiative logo on a wine I bottled just as a new season of Lost was starting.

The Text: Explain and get them interested

Once I have the artwork, I choose the text style and color to match. Placement is just as important. You don’t want to trample over a beautiful sunset or a pretty smile with boldfaced text. The top and bottom are usually good places, and you can often say a lot on one side or the other without ruining or upstaging the artwork. What do you say? That depends on who you’re serving to. For other winemakers, you might include the basic measurements, the yeast, and other details about how you made it. If you mainly serve mead or unusual wine to friends who are unfamiliar with it, then a short explanation can go a long way. You might say something like, “apple juice and sugar can ferment into a terrific white wine!” or “men have been fermenting honey and water to make mead for centuries.” Remember, you haven’t got a lot of room so keep it short, tell them what they’re drinking, and pique their interest.

If you already make labels for your wine, I’d love to hear about them. If not, give it a try. You might find it’s just the finishing touch to set your wines apart.

It fermented out to a specific gravity (SG) of 0.996, and I didn’t sweeten. Since the original gravity was about 1.082, I’m calling it 11% alcohol by volume. The pH was 3.0, and titratable acidity (TA) was 4 g/L, as tartaric. I should mention two things about the TA. First, I’m getting some inconsistent results using my new apparatus that determines TA by measuring the amount of CO2 given off by a base neutralizing an acid. I’ll have more to say about this in another post. The other thing is that TA measurements of mead are tricky, and are best thought of as upper limits rather than precise values.

So how does it taste? That Lady of the House and I really enjoyed it. Oak is discernible and pleasant, but it plays a supporting role not the lead. Aroma is muted, and I think that’s a characteristic of the honey. I don’t have any on hand for a direct comparison, but I remember meads from heather and clover honey having stronger aromas.

Would boiling have improved this mead?

That gives me an idea. If wildflower from Miller’s Honey has a weak aroma, then it may be a candidate for boiling. This is just one batch, and each year’s wildflower honey probably differs from those of previous years, so I’m not ready to make such a blanket statement. It’s something to keep in mind, though.

I experimented with boiling and found that it weakens a mead’s aroma, but may give it more body and a smoother taste. Is it worth it? That depends on a lot of things, including personal taste, but if the aroma is going to be unremarkable anyway, this might be a good trade off.

About the Label

For me, making a label starts with nice artwork. Sometimes I use my own photos, but more often I use the work of another artist. Gary Cooper (no, not that Gary Cooper) was kind enough to allow me the use of his photo for this label. Gary’s collections of classic Hollywood photos is terrific, and my only problem was deciding which one I wanted to use - thanks Gary!

There’s only room for so much text, so I try to be informative and to the point. I include a name, “bin number” (there must have been one of those Aussie wines in the house when I started that) that identifies the batch, starting and bottling dates, and relevant measurements.

And now, the easy part

The most relevant measure is, of course, how it tastes and I’ll be doing a lot of research on that in the months (and years?) to come - cheers!