Greetings

This blog is a record of the wine that I make and drink. Each flavour made and each bottle drunk will appear here. You may come to the conclusion that, on the whole, I should be drinking less.

Sunday 16 February 2014

Prune & Parsnip Wine 2014 - The Making Of ...

After having my teeth scraped, polished and cleaned at the dentists, I went in search of parsnips. Noshis, our usual fruit & veg place, was closed and the next nearest shop had vegetables one stage away from the compost heap, so I resorted to Morrisons, which is an unlovely supermarket. They had prunes and parsnips aplenty, so I bought half a kilo of the former and four pounds of the latter.


The remainder of the weekend was busy with Music Club, walking in the Howardian Hills and ploughing through The Rainbow (which involved much gnashing of teeth), so I put the parsnips in our coal shed and retrieved them on Saturday 8th February.

I cut the parsnips into small pieces, covered them in our largest pan with eight pints of water and let them stand for a couple of hours whilst I did other wine-making things - mostly rinsing and sterilising bottles for redcurrant wine.


I chopped each of the prunes into three or four pieces and put these in my bucket with 5 lbs 12 oz sugar. This is a touch less sugar than previous years and I do not know how much difference it will make. I brought the pan containing the parsnips to the boil and boiled them for twenty minutes. By this time the parsnips were soft and had lost much of their flavour. I poured the liquid over the prunes and sugar and discarded the parsnips. I boiled another seven pints of water and pourd this into the bucket too.

On Sunday morning I added the yeast and a teaspoon each of nutrient and pectolase. My recipe says I should also put in some amylase, but I have run out. If the wine hasn't cleared by racking I will buy a jar and put a teaspoon in then.


I left this until Thursday, 13 February, before sieving out the prunes and putting the liquid into its demijohns. This was a longer, stickier process than I had anticipated, and it looks like there will be a large amount of sludge at the bottom. I could have used about another pint of water. As usual, this is my brownest of wines.

If you want to see how this wine turned out, click here

No comments:

Post a Comment