Starting Again

Winter was a very busy time - the mother in law had a heart bypass which led to a stroke so we had a couple of months with no spare time. We then had to catch up with our own things at home. Now the weather has warmed up a bit so I've spent a fair bit of time in the veggie patch.

We did manage to make a few WoWs over the winter, but didn't have time to blog about them. Also, we've almost emptied our "wine cellar", which was simply a bottle of each of the wines we made last year.

We've definitely noticed that storing the wines for a few months really did reduce the harshness. That "mouthful of petrol" kick that you get from a newly made wine had mellowed or disappeared. Some wines like cranberry WoW seemed to have much more body than when they were first made.

We also tried one of the demijohns of blackberry wine. Pretty good! I'm sure it will improve if we leave it longer to mature.

We're now down to just 1.5 bottles of wine - a Raspberry, Loganberry and Redcurrant wine, and a raspberry wine, one of the first batch we made. I think they're both great, looking forward to finishing them off.

We have a cloudy apple WoW ready to bottle and an orange WoW ready to stabilise, and a 5 gallon Carafe 21 white kit that I stabilised this morning. We should be bottling this next Friday or Saturday.

The Carafe 21 should take 21 days, but only if temperature remains constant at 25C. This one has taken 8 weeks to ferment down to 1.000 - the back room has been quite cold overnight, and despite the bucket being next to the radiator, it takes all day to warm up to 20C. I've dug out the submersible heaters to use on the next Carafe 21 red kit. I tested them yesterday and they work.

We've decided to build up our wine stocks by brewing some WoWs in bulk rather than making single gallons at a time. Last night we went to Aldi and stocked up on red and white grape juice, and this morning we got 5 gallons started. I have more buckets to clean and sort out so will get more on the go soon.

And of course I still have loads of demijohns of various country wines maturing. Some have suffered from a stuck ferment. I'll need to update all my records and get these working again so that we can make some new wines.

And now, I'm heading for the garden while the sun still shines .....