Wagner Wines

The following is Craig's expanding wine portfolio with wines he has designed and/or fermented. Some wines are available now for refill into your BottomlessBrew bottles, see what's On Tap. Please suggest new additions to the portfolio!

For those who regularly drink wine and want to make 6 gallons at a pop, home wine making is a great way to go. You can get excellent quality wine for about $3/bottle. Wine making compared to all-grain brewing is easy. No cooking of grains, no sparging, no boiling. Home wine making is all about selecting the right grapes and then managing the multi-stage fermentation and racking/clarifying process. It is not equipment intensive, and you can buy all you need from local home beer/wine stores. After you taste how good homemade wine can be, perhaps you'll make our own!

Ann Arbor Graffiti Sauvignon Blanc. Created 7/3/2011, batch #1. This is my first foray into wine making so I chose my favorite style of wine, a light

and dry Sauvignon Blanc from California. The grapes came in juice form from Winexpert.

As I was thinking about my favorite wine I also started thinking about my favorite city (Ann Arbor). Among its many joys, Ann Arbor is very visually appealing. One thing that always catches my eye is the big mural at the corner of Liberty and State painted by Richard Wolk. The mural depicts famous writers including Woody Allen (he wrote "Without Feathers"), Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka and Anais Nin. The image on the label is of Edgar taken from that mural.

I like the way this Sauvignon Blanc turned out. It is a wine you can really enjoy by itself or with any meal that isn't of an overpowering character. The wine is slightly fruity with a nice light dryness. More mellow than crisp. Very satisfying and easy to drink.

The wine gods smiled on the fermenting of this wine and gave me the right incentive to continue with more wine into the future.

K-Hill Kitchen Pear Wine. Created 9/14/11, batch #2. Please limit refill requests to one bottle of Pear Wine

since we only produced about 3 gallons. This wine comes from the 2011 harvest of Bartlett pears from our K-Hill mini-farm. We (well, Kristin really) planted this kitchen orchard not too long after we moved here. We have about 16 trees, primarily apple, but three pear.

I've always loved working in the orchard and have been fairly diligent with early spring pruning to get the trees well formed. My father had a small orchard and his parents before him. Perhaps its in my blood. I've always liked the self-sufficiency and the magic of producing food from the earth that orcharding brings. When I've focused on it (which has not been often in the last 20 years), I've put up scores of quarts of applesauce and pressed cider (adding pears into the apple cider gives a nice sweetness).

More commonly, the orchard has been shared with local deer who have been more diligent in picking the orchard's bounty than me. They get up on their hind legs to reach the upper fruit and there is a "fruit line" about 7-8 feet off the ground that marks the limits of their reach.

Now that I'm semi-retired, I'll have more time and gumption to work the orchard. As such, it seemed appropriate to start with a straight-ahead pear wine (also called "perry") as my first locally-grown wine. I made the wine after the fall harvest in 2011 and we will take our first taste in the spring. I think May 1st, May Day, would be a great day to uncork (unkeg) it. That will mark the one-year anniversary of my retirement and is the beginning of what is arguably the most beautiful Michigan month. A most auspicious day!

The recipe for this wine came from a book on fruit wines. The fermenter is filled with cubes of ripe pear, water, a fair amount of honey and yeast. Mother nature does the rest. And she does very well! Hard cider is certainly next! [Recipe: 16k View Download]

Shakey Jake Chardonnay. Created 6/15/12, batch #3. After the success of the Sauvignon Blanc, I decided to

keep in the white wine family and go with a French Chardonnay.

I've put a local flavor in the naming of each of my wines so far and found my inspiration here in an Ann Arbor icon, Shakey Jake. Shakey Jake was a wonderfully colorful man. For decades you could find Jake on the streets of Ann Arbor dressed often in a white suit with a big hat often carrying his pink guitar. He would sing, strum the guitar and engage passersby in conversation. I would sometimes see him and speak with him as he presided in a coffee shop.

His guitar playing was decidedly interesting - I don't think he ever really tuned it, nor really strove to hit any particular chords. It was, however, rhythmic and noticeable.