A bottle of Halloween Wine on All Hallows' Eve, albeit opened a day early. The wine has a hint of chili taste and is a dry, fruity red. Mostly we drank it whilst watching television. On Friday it was Taskmaster which is silly and joyous and exactly right for these difficult times. I think snot bubbled from my nose at one point. Then on Halloween we finished the bottle watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show with the Snarkalong Film Club. It was a radical film for 1975 and has actually aged quite well. Tim Curry is just fabulous!
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| Wiggy on my lap, using wide angle lens |
Hi.
ReplyDeleteI have been reading this blog quite a lot and wondering if I would be able to do this myself. Is there a basic method that you use? Thank you.
Hello!
DeleteThanks for getting in contact. Making wine is really easy and you would definitely be able to do it yourself. The most difficult thing is patience: because it generally takes about 6 months between starting the wine and drinking it.
You do need some basic equipment: a bucket with a lid, a carboy (called demijohns in the UK, but I think you are American), some plastic tubing, a large wooden spoon, a potato masher.
My basic recipe (and here I am simplifying, but many boil down to this) is 4 lbs fruit, mashed in a bucket. Pour in 6.5 UK pints of boiling water (so 130 fluid ounces in total - US pints are smaller) and three lbs of sugar. Stir it all round and leave over night. Add 1 teaspoon each of yeast, yeast nutrient and pectolase the next morning and stir once a day for 5 or 6 days. At the end of that, transfer the liquid (sieving out the fruit) into the demijohn, leaving a little bit of room at the top until fermentation has died down a little. Fix a rubber bung with an airlock (which is half filled with water). When fermentation has died down, fill the demijohn from either retained liquid or water. Wait for 2 months, and then siphon off the liquid from the dead yeast at the bottom into a new demijohn. Top up the gap with a mix of sugar and water (at a ratio of 4 oz sugar to 1 pint of water). Leave until 6 months after starting and then bottle.
If you want to email me, feel free. I will leave my email address up for a day, and then take it down again tomorrow. It is ben14hardy@yahoo.co.uk .
All the very best
Ben
Thank you for the response! I'm buying the equipment I don't have right now.
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