More on Wine

Follow up on wine making.

As you know we were at the Wine Making Club meeting. If you do not, S-chan will soon

write about it. For instance HERE LINK

I was expecting just a bit of wine to try, plus some nice conversation about wine making. We

did get that of course. However, what I did not count on is the about of wine!

We tried:

3 types of raspberry wine. Each at least a year old, one was 20 years old, it was unfortunately not too good, smelly and not pleasant, with sharp taste.

The best one was really sweet and raspberry, pleasant smell too, not too sweet. Photo >>

Third one was was good enough but nothing special.

Later we tried one more very old wine, also 20 years old, with special ingredients... nobodycould guess! The maker finally owned up it was made with an addition of coffee. It was truly marvelous. Photo >>

We also had a quite expensive wine - by wine making standards. You have to buy a kit for 66 pounds which makes 5 gallons. This is roughly 20 litres of wine or about 26 bottles. This in turn makes a bottle of really tasty wine for 2 pound (if you have the equipment already)

2 Pounds = 270 Yen. This is good wine too, not something undrinkable.Very tasty and even better after a year of waiting.

I recently read too that the wine generally does not get much better after more than 1 year, just the very best wines benefit from long storage.

We did get drunk, I mean I for instance could go cycling home without problems but it would be to dangerous to S-chan so we went home by taxi leaving the bikes in the city behind a steel fence. The next day was difficult for me. We got back at 3 a.m. and my job stars at 8. Getting up was quite difficult and the whole day really bad considering that I was very sleepy and hung-over at the same time.

Today I am doing overtime, 4 hours. I hope this is going to be pleasant since they said it would be cabling some computers (from what I understand.) It means I will be very late at home, I suppose just before 11. After I get back, I will be finishing the first part of wine.

Yesterday I added some final ingredients. The wine packs have a few small plastic bags which you have to add in an order. First the yeast which needs to ferment. Afterwards, you need to kill the yeast :) and you add the "stabiliser." Now, depending on the type of wine (or wine kit) you should add the "finings." Sometimes you add them with the stabiliser, sometimes a day after. They are substances which are not harmful but not to be drunk, mostly special minerals or chemicals. They make all the tiny particles of wine drop down in the demijohn and clarify the wine beautifully. This works very well and without these substances even the best wine in the world would be difficult to make without leaving clouds of white yeast and strings of denatured protein. Sounds complicated but really means - would look strange and disgusting.

I will then add all the remaining "finings" - kieselsol and chitosan and wait for them to clear the wine.

-------------a few hours have passed-------------

Actually, I just got home from my overtime :) yuppii, 45 minutes overtime and 4 hours pay :D ho ho ho. So coming back to the wine

Just added the final ingredients, now a few days of waiting and we could start drinking the wine. We will wait a bit though. Need to prepare the bottles, the corks and the lables. For the first part we will only need 12 bottles.

After that we need to wait a month more for the second wine to be ready.

Right now it looks like that - still cloudy but that is because I have to remove the gas through shaking it. Photo >>