Last weeks wine meeting.

Hi, as promised I am writing about the winemakers circle last Wednesday.

We had a very good time, trying some wines and listening to a very professional presentation by DICKY!

A very very small competition of rosehip wine took place too. Only 2 contesting wines though. What a difference between them nevertheless. One was relatively young for Dickie's standards, only 2 years old. The other one was not even one year old, from Eileen, the wife of the shop owner.

The first and older wine was very dry, with a strange smell - for me at least since S. liked it very much. It was good though, I personally do not have anything special to say about it. The second wine was more to my taste. Sweeter, with more fruity taste and very dark, almost black. I liked it very much.

We then listened to a small lecture about making champagne-type wines, such as Asti, Spumante, in general sparkling wines.

To make the long story short, you can make such wine in two ways.

First Method:

The easier method is to make a clear wine as usual but do not stabilize it, i.e. do not kill the yeast. Add some sugar into bottles and close the bottles. The question arises what bottles you should be using though. It is very complicated to make a sparkling wine as you make it as clear as when you buy one from the shops, even a cheap one. When the yeast grows and eats sugar from the wine, it will loose cells which accumulate at the bottom and cause SEDIMENT. There are ways to get rid of this but everything is quite complicated because you would need special corks with place for the dead yeast cells - you would ferment the bottles upside down so the yeast falls down into a special space in the cork. Later you could freeze the neck of the bottle, take the cork out, and put a new one in. Very difficult and dangerous too. You could use different special corks allowing you to "trap" the dead yeast in the cork. That would be quite easy but... these kinds of corks are not being made anymore!!! Dicky has a few left but he is not selling them :)

Or you could simply use big 1, 1.5 or 2 litre PET (fizzy drinks plastic) bottles, ferment the wine in them and later pour it into glasses VERY CAREFULLY to avoid moving the sediment on the bottom - not too difficult to do. Everybody in the circle was saying that plastic PET bottles do not add any taste and they are also very easy and safe to use. They are made for high pressures so they will not EXPLODE, unlike normal wine bottles!!!


Second Method:

You make wine and add CO2 (carbon dioxide) from a pressurised metal container. The CO2 containers are easy to buy because people use them for Soda-water at home (for instance for Soda stream.)

For wine though you would have to have special equipment. Obviously, you cannot buy it anymore. Again, Dicky has everything and is not selling :)

After the presentation/lecture, we could try some of the just-made sparkling wine. Very good it was too. Actually, Dicky made a hands-on presentation, bringing a huge 2 litre PET bottle of flat wine from home and adding CO2 to it with a special injector cap (a bottle cap you can use to put gas into the liquid, the cap will only let the gas get into and not out of the bottle.) That was so very interesting.

Unfortunately, we got drunk again...

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今日もHappyな一日になりますように！
kojiczuk (kojisato & Pa-panda)