Currant Wine

[also written on and intended for July 1, 2010]

Since I was thinking of starting a new currant wine, this morning I went into the basement in search of a bottle to try. I opened one from 2009, decanted it, and poured a glass to try a few sips.

It was a wine that I believe would prove agreeable enough for some home winemakers. It was not adequate for this household, though.

When I looked at the records, I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I had made it as a cooked wine, pouring boiling water over the hapless red currants. Martha noted, when I saw this in my records, that last summer we had no way of knowing, as of yet, the real difference between the cooked and raw wines.

As a cooked wine, I should note, red currant is actually superior to strawberry wine -- more delicate, less fruity.

Cheers ...

Days of Bottling

Two batches of beer received attention they were supposed to have had a week ago -- at last, on Saturday night. One batch went into secondary; the other, into bottles. Martha's first attempt at a peat-smoked porter seems especially promising -- maybe I should say wildly promising. It makes a fine draught beer just as it is. The peat-smoked flavor comes through nicely; the mouth-feel is smooth. The batch was small, resulting in just over a case of bottles, now being basemented for a month.

Martha kept her bottle-sterilizing energies going into Sunday, which gave me all the goading I needed to catch up on more wine-bottling that afternoon. Some of the wines coming out of secondaries seem doubtful -- especially the apple-berry. I have the feeling apple wines will prove challenging to master. Others of the new wines seem more promising. Martha thinks Wine 40, a dry Cherry, may turn out quite fine, by Fall -- while I am less hopeful about the flavor. Wine 42, also a dry Cherry, however, gives me greater hopes. The Elderberry wine flavor was quite nice, at this stage -- but maybe too woodish? Too weak in alcohol? The Black Currant wine, though ... great stuff even now, to judge from our few sips.

We made a few blends with the left-overs from bottling -- with the single bottle combining red and black currant wines at about half-and-half proportions being the one we will likely be most curious about, come Fall.

Cheers ...

Call It Aging, If You Will

Hours pass with seemingly small result; yet they are necessary hours.

Same way, months.

This past Sunday I spent time in kitchen sterilizing bottles, doing a little bottling of wines from their secondaries, and a bit of racking of other wines that were in less-than-gallon bottles. Martha was a little alarmed yesterday when looking at beer recipes to find that a porter she plans to make soon will take eight weeks. These wines I was moving from container to container were ones started in June, in July, in August. Since most of the source ingredients grew in our backyard, the timeline might be shoved back even farther.

Red currants seem to have grown in this area for what may be, in human terms, forever. When this house was built, around 1900, woods had more of a foothold; and hereabouts red currants are part of the woods. The plant from which we harvested was one we planted, though. We did so just to the west of the grapes, thinking they would be shaded in morning -- a consideration we are no longer sure was necessary, since for most of our backyard getting away from the shade of surrounding trees is more the issue. Since this is the first real red currant wine for us, it has been several years in the making -- if measured from our planning, digging and planting.

As a wine, though, it is only around its sixth month or so. Almost halfway there, to the wine-bottling mind. Yet all wines are drinkable after first fermentation, if perhaps not quite desirably so. Sitting down to a gallon crock of new wine would not be most people's idea of a palate-pleasing time. Aging works wonders, when the aging is done properly. Finding out what "properly" means, at all stages of the process, is part of the experiment.

And I think at times that this finding-out is a means to age myself more properly than I have managed to do at many points in the past.

Cheers ...