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 ...

Strawberry Wine, Part III

In our days of rainy picking we had filled a few bowls.

Over the years we have accumulated a stash of stainless-steel containers, mostly bowls, which come in for regular service during the summer. At the beginning of this week we were at the point, in fact, of having bowls of strawberries, fully ripe, on two refrigerator shelves, while other bowls of ripe or ripening berries were taking up space on kitchen table and kitchen window ledge ... prompting Martha to make noises about running out of bowls for gathering greens from the garden and for making the evening salad.

So late Monday I was preparing the five-gallon crock and measuring out ingredients based on a wine we liked from last year's efforts of around this time.

Enlarging the recipe called for enough strawberries to half-fill the rock, before their being chopped and mashed down. I washed and emptied large bowl after large bowl of berries -- not quite depleting our stores, but completely using all but the ones still ripening.

Twelve and a half pounds ...

It astonishes me still -- having such a quantity of such fleeting delicacies ... mashed up and given over to the labors of yeasts.

Cheers ...

Strawberry Wine, Part II

As I noted before the holiday, the situation seemed promising for doing a direct comparison between cooked Wine 30, strawberry, and raw Wine 32, also strawberry, made soon afterward.

Having opened Wine 30 on that day, I went back into the basement to find Wine 32 -- and turned up Wine 30 after Wine 30. Somewhere among the bottles we may yet have some Wine 32. My suspicion, though, is that I had left the Wine 32 bottles on a table nearer the front of the basement ... so that they were the ones that I fetched up on whatever whimsical evenings they were that came along, when a bit of something different sounded like just the thing to break up the same-old.

The chances are good that this nicely set-up opportunity for visual and nasal and lingual comparative testing has passed us by.

On the other hand, the chances are mighty good, too, that had I found a bottle of Wine 32 in the basement, that day, I would have uncorked it, decanted it ... and then we would have said, "Ah! Better!" -- and consigned Wine 30 to the fridge for cooking, without giving a thought to doing a thoughtful, careful comparison.

For I did bring forth a Wine 29, rhubarb-strawberry, instead -- a raw wine -- and we said, "Ah! Better!" -- and consigned Wine 30 to the fridge for cooking.

We have quite a lot of Wine 30. We had better do quite a lot of cooking.

Cheers ...

Strawberry Wine

Earlier this year we tried some of last year's strawberry wine. What pleased us about it was its not-so-strawberryish nature --

Limpid, faintly aromatic, delicate of flavor, with an edge of tang to its dryness.

This last Sunday morning I went looking for a breakfast wine, and thought that with the strawberries in the yard blooming and beginning their fruiting, I should bring up from the basement a bit of strawberry. I found a goodly many bottles of a particular batch, and emerged with a liter in hand. Decanted, it had an amber-tinted red-fruit color, with a definite strawberry smell. The taste was a bit toward the sweeter end of the spectrum, with typical strawberry flavor dominating.

While this wine towered above our strawberry wines of the year before, it was not quite what we wanted to be drinking, beyond the first half-glass or so, on a Sunday morning.

I checked in our records, where I discovered that this batch was a cooked wine. The wine that we started immediately afterwards, however, was a raw-fruit wine. That must have been the one we had tasted and found satisfying, earlier in the year.

Last summer the idea was taking firmer root in our minds that cooked wines were the sort we would rather not drink -- while raw wines offered the prospect of pleasing drinking. And here we had given ourselves a chance for a clear comparison ...

Cheers ...