I drank some of my first Miller’s Gate wine with dinner last night. We had a bought bottle to compare with – nothing special. Whilst you couldn’t say mine was not wine, it was certainly rather dry in comparison. But it was drinkable and got drunk. With the right food it might be ideal. I’ve just got to learn how to make wine sweeter I guess.
I’d been worrying about the wine not clarifying, but didn’t want to open the demijohn to let oxygen in. Lack of patience got to me and I decided to rack it off in to my little half demijohn and one bottle, leaving the rest for testing. My wife and I both had a little sip of the dregs. It tasted of… cheap wine (and much better than the orange filth from years ago). Hopefully it will improve with ageing – at least that is the theory. Since (ignoring the £15 bucket, £3 yeast, £2 finings…) it cost 10p for about 5 bottles it really is cheap wine. It is good enough to drink the half bottle with dinner and can only (hopefully) improve.
I also racked off the elderberry and topped it up with water. I didn’t keep enough to taste properly, but from the drips I think it will be OK.
I checked on the white wine today, which should be well on the way to clarifying and looking “bright” (according to my instructions). (According to my instructions it should have an airlock too, but I’ve run out.)
Looks possibly like it might be clearing. A bit. Maybe. And a rather green tinge to the naked eye. It needs to be racked off in a week or so (if clear) and I have just one demijohn left.
Towards the end of September 2013 I’d been gently encouraged to make wine with a friend’s grapes. I looked in to it and felt it was far too hard what with all the tools and additives you needed. Egged on by some home brew relations I plunged in to making something resembling wine with English grapes. I bought a hydrometer, pectolase, and a fermentation bucket from May and Brett and we filled it with grapes. I washed them and squashed them and ended up with a pitiful 4.5 litres of juice. Squashing them was a trial. I gave them a good fisting in the end.
The recipe said leave it for 24 hours and at the end we had something remarkably like grape juice. I sweetened it up to exactly 1080 using bog standard household sugar but measured it carefully using the instructions on the hydrometer. Once I got the calculation right I was fine!
I whacked in the yeast and waited for action. This was frustrating because whilst it was clearly fermenting there was no bubbler action at all. (I later worked out that the bucket was not sealing at all. There was a blemish in the seal that I scraped off with a knife).
In the end, I took advice from my father-in-law and we decanted it in to a demijohn. It bubbled away until the next stage – which will be clarifying somehow.
I’m still catching up with posts since starting this blog, but I like this rather grainy photo of the white wine and elderberry wine sitting in the cellar. I slightly worry about the air gap above the white wine in particular, but think that it is all carbon dioxide if I have done things right so I should be OK.