Wine Making
Making wine is a great way to be able to enjoy getting what you like (and plenty of it), while sharing it with friends....
I got into making wine several years ago. It all started with making mead. Mead is wine that is made by fermenting honey, instead of grapes. Like other wines, you can make it dry, or you can make it sweet. I prefer SWEET mead! Mindy likes the mead also and sometimes drinks it before it has aged enough.
Having a "Helpful Assistant" adds more than just the extra set of hands to the process. Though as much as Mindy likes the wine and mead, it might not be long before it'll be hard to tell which one of us is the wine maker, and which one might have become the "assistant"! Mindy has also started taking a helpful hand in editing the web page, and keeping it up to date with the current batches in progress, and the ones that we want to try.
In addition to basic "show" mead (mead made from nothing but honey, water, and yeast), it is possible to make fruit flavored meads. A couple of these attempts (peach mead, and stawberry mead) were ~ok~, but not so hot. After reviewing the options, it was time to try wine kits.
At this point, I discovered Water2Wine. (http://www.water2wine.us/austin/)
Water2Wine is a great place that helps you make your own wine. (For about $250-400/batch) They provide the kit, all the stuff you need, and a place to work. You, or your group of friends, go in and mix up the wine kit. They store it in their back room, let it age, rack it, etc. - and then you come back to bottle it.
The really cool part about Water2Wine is that you can go there for wine tastings, and buy their wines by the glass, bottle, or batch. MOST of their wines are available as kits - either at my local Austin Homebrew (http://austinhomebrew.com), or online from the various places that sell wine kits. Mindy likes Austin Homebrew also and for online ordering Adventures in Homebrewing (http://www.homebrewing.org/). They are reasonably priced.
Favorite Places and sites:
http://www.water2wine.us/austin
Wines that I've made so far include:
Sweet Mead- Orange Blossom Honey
Sangria
Peach Apricot Chardonnay
Merlot (for my friends that like RED)
Chocolate Raspberry Port
Exotic Fruits White Zinfandel
Muscat
Reisling Ice Wine
Okanagan Peach Ice Wine
Cranberry Chianti
Joe's Ancient Orange Cinamon Clove Mead
Mango
Here's a picture of what your kitchen / dinette will turn into, if you get into this seductive hobby:
In the lower left is the 6 gallon carboy of Cranberry Chianti that is just about ready to be bottled.
In the middle is a 6 gallon batch of sweet mead, made with Round Rock honey. The third batch (upper right) is the 3 gallon test batch of "Joe's Ancient Mead". In the far upper right of the picture is my custom made wine rack (you gotta' have a place to put all that wine!).
And here's a place to keep the wine:
The top half is for splits and bottles that are capped. They stand upright. The bottom half allows for corked wine bottles that need to lay on their side.
BOTTLES:
Bottling wine in beer bottles may seem unconventional - but there's a couple of reasons to do this: First, we don't drink that much wine at a time. A beer bottle holds half the volume of a wine bottle (beer bottles and "splits" are both about 375ml, whereas a wine bottle is typically 750ml). Second, in addition to being slightly less expensive, beer bottles require less effort to "cap" than wine bottles do to "cork".
LABELS:
Most people don't think much about the label. Or, if they do, they put all the effort into the artwork on the label, and very little effort into the selection of the label itself. There are some of us that are much more "practical" than we are "artistic". Peeling labels off bottles stinks!
Think about this: If you're seriously into making wine or beer, you're probably going to be recycling a LOT of your bottles, over and over again. Doesn't it make sense to pick a label that is EASY to get back off the bottle?
The label that we have settled on is the Avery "White REPOSITIONABLE Shipping Label" - number 55163. These labels are 2" x 4". Not huge, but you get a good number per page. This keeps the cost of the label down (if you're making an inexpensive wine kit, you don't want the cost of the bottle / label / cap or cork / etc. to end up costing more than the wine!). The labels come in sheet form, so they're easy to run through a standard printer. Avery provides free software for designing your own labels. One of the features that I like about their software is that we are able to include a "serial number" to put a "bottle number" on each bottle of wine made.
Wines that we want to make:
Blackberry Jam WIne
Chocolate Orange Port
10/24/2011-The chocolate orange port has been ordered from Wine Makers Depot. It should be here this weekend.
http://www.winemakersdepot.com/default.aspx
When I get a chance, I'll add more about how to make wine, and a few pictures...