I had always wondered how people amassed enormous wine collections. I wondered how they filled their huge cellar with 1600 bottles of the finest vintages from around the world. Hell, I wondered how people filled their 8 position wine racks from Target without drinking all the good stuff before its time. The answer, in retrospect, shouldn't have surprised me.
Be unable to drink! I had no idea that all these wine collectors were pregnant. It seems strange that it should be a hobby followed by only those gravid with child, (and their partners in crime) but there it is. Seems like the only explanation.
Anyway, that's the position we find ourselves in (warning, long, somewhat boring story mentioned in the previous post coming). Last summer we picked a boatload of elderberries, blackberries and peaches. We also found a couple sources of cheap honey and decided it was time to branch out into Mead (well, technically Melomel and Metheglin, but who's counting?) So, looking at a full freezer and empty fermenters we made some wine and mead.
Yep. That's my fermentation area. Some would call it disorganized, some a creative war zone, others a health hazard. I call it the only place I have for fermenting things right now. But enough about the area, let's talk about the actual booze.
Elderberry Wine: Think of it as a thick, syrupy red wine with a little coppery, almost medicinal (but in a good way) kind of middle flavor and a very fruity aftertaste. Nice stuff, and easily the most traditionally wine-like of our batches. It could almost pass as a very big, very strange Shiraz.
Peach Wine: I didn't get to make as much of this as I wanted, but it's great. Fruity, summery and showing some signs that it's young harshness is going to mature into something really complex and nice.
Blackberry Wine: It's a lot like the elderberry, but smoother and less full. The mouth feel is more like a grape wine, but the flavor is very different, you sense more than taste the blackberry fruit notes, and the harsh alcohol will hopefully mellow in the bottle.
Blackberry Mead: It’s almost like a white wine, crisp, a little fruity and still too harsh to tease out complex flavors, but should be great after some time in the bottle.
Ginger Mead: I did half of this sparkling and half of it still. You can really taste the ginger heat, but again, like the Blackberry, it'll take some time before I know how this is really going to taste. I have high hopes though. There's a reason ancient man thought of wine as a cheap way to make mead. Properly aged it's some tasty stuff.
I made all those batches essentially at the same time last summer ('07) and I've been racking them and watching them and trying to hold off on drinking them so as to get them all properly aged. I went into an orgy of bottling and in my frenzy bottled 70 bottles across those batches. That's 13.9 gallons, give or take. It should all be very drinkable soon, but until then it looks great on the shelf with Gretchen's wonderful labels.
So that brings me forward to this year's harvest. We missed the blackberries (mostly), the squirrels got the peaches, and the elderberries were pretty picked over by the hungry birds (it was a HARD year for fruit, heck, for any food crops). So I have 2 gallons of Elderberry wine currently in fermenters (they're the small jugs closed with tinfoil) and that's it for the fruit we could pick ourselves. Hopefully we can make up for it in '09.
The biggest project right now is the cranberry wine. I ended up getting 6 gallons (might shrink to five by the time it's in bottles because of the pulp in it) and I just racked it on the 22nd. If very young tastes are any indication of future quality (and they sometimes are) then this will be the Best Cranberry Wine Ever. It tastes of fresh cranberries and the color is a deep beautiful red. It still has a little sugar left in it, but that should be gone by the time I bottle it and it'll be bone dry, fruity and wonderful. I also decided to try a second pressing with it. I dumped the fruit pulp into another bucket with 2 more gallons of water and 6 pounds of sugar. It should make a lighter version of the original wine. Or completely tasteless alcohol water. It's a crapshoot.
I'm planning a large batch of fig wine. It's been a couple years, but I froze some figs, and my parents stocked their freezer too, so there should be enough for a sizable batch (I hope 6.5 gallons, but I'll settle for whatever I can get). It was good in previous years (almost as good as the cranberry) and I'm looking forward to seeing what this year has to offer. But that's just speculation.
To round out the light alcohol projects I have a batch of Sahti and a batch of Barleywine. Both end up with a big beer for aging and a little beer for drinking. That'll roll us up to 20 gallons of beer that I'll talk about later. Maybe I'll take pictures of the whole process and write it up. We'll see. I'll have enough grain left over that if I get a few more ingredients I can maybe try that cranberry beer Gretchen talked about in the last post. Mmmmmm, Cranberry.
On the hard liquor front we're soaking 3 gallons of Cranberry vodka (below), a couple liters of Cranberry liquor (with orange and lime peel in it!) pictured to the left, a 1.75 liter bottle of limecello starter (that'll turn into a solid gallon of sweet, sour limecello) and a 750 of pepper vodka for martinis, Bloody Marys and general cooking. I've tasted essentially none of these, but if they work out like I hope we're looking down the barrel of a good good booze year at the Bedell compound.
There! Done with booze rambling for the moment! See, that wasn't so long and boring. . .well, so it was long but not boring. . . fine, long and boring, but the info should be out there! or at least written down so I can remember next year. Because if I don't make sure we pace ourselves over the next year I'm not sure I'm going to remember this year at all. In any event, hope you enjoyed the booze discussion and I'll get back to you as I start the beers.