It's Strawberry Wine Season - I saw the Sign!

I saw the Sign - the U-Pick-Em Sign at Adams Farm on Highway 54 West in Fayetteville.  This makes Strawberry Wine Season official.

So right before you go to pick or pick up your Strawberries, come by to get fresh ingredients for your wine.

It will take about 18 pounds of Strawberries to make 5 Gallons of Wine.  Make sure they are the ripest and freshest looking.  If they taste good to eat, they will be good for making wine.

Go to the How To Make Wine area of our website to learn more about making wine from fresh fruit and check out our Recipe for Strawberry Wine.

A Few Extra Hop Rhizomes

We just wanted to let you know that we ordered a few extra hop rhizomes just in case you did not have a chance to pre-order. These have been shipped and will be arriving at our store in the next 3 days.

Just call to reserve yours.

Look at our growing Cascade Hop Bine!

Our Cascade Hop Bines have really taken off. This is what second year growth looks like. We could plant our hops in the ground, but we have found that we have much better success planting in raised beds and planters in our part of Georgia.

This plant will get transplanted to a new home in a large re-purposed whiskey barrel. Then it will get trellised to give it lots of room to grow. We will also trim back initial growth to improve production of the bine.

How to Hack Your Slow Cooker

I know it sounds like a joke, but during the Cheesemaking class on Saturday we started talking about how nice it would be to have a slow cooker that would heat by temperature.

Tonight I decided to go online and see how much one of these puppies would cost.  After discovering the $299 price tag, I did yet another search and found this helpful video.

Who would o' thunk?

Kat

Malolactic Fermentation (MF) in My Cellar

Wine Making 201

If you have ever made wine from fresh grapes or from fresh grape juice (not Welches frozen concentrate) late winter becomes an interesting time of the year. Your wine has been in the secondary for several months and is nice and clear. Not much is going on...the holiday season is over, the grapes from the southern hemisphere have not yet arrived (Chilean grapes and juices) and you begin thinking about filtering and bottling your wine.

The picture to the left is Malolactic Fermentation currently going on in the wine one of the wines in my cellar.  The little white ring is an accumulation of tiny bubbles.

This is the time of year that something interesting can happen to your wines. If the acid has a good amount of MALIC acid and fairly low amounts of sulfite, AND the temperature of your cellar goes up a few degrees, Malolactic Fermentation (MLF) can begin. That's the MLF you occasionally see in the winemaking publications and books you may have read.

This can be a good thing given the right circumstances. If your wine is a bit high in acid, the MLF will reduce the acid by converting the harsher MALIC acid into the softer LACTIC acid. It happens when bacteria that is naturally in your wine wakes up and begins a new kind of fermentation. You may find that your wine is nice and clear, but there is a low level fermentation activity in you air lock. You may also see a fine band of bubbles around the neck of your carboy. If you shake the carboy, you WILL blow off a bit of carbonation! During this fermentation, the wine will of course have a reduced titratable acid level AND it may take on a slight buttery/butterscotch aroma and flavor. A nice combination for a Chardonnay!

Can I sweeten my wine when I rack it into the secondary vessel?

Before you sweeten your wine, it is important that you wait until the fermentation has completed, and the wine has had plenty of time to clear out all the wine yeast. Quite often, this does not happen by the time you do the second racking.

Actually, the best time to sweeten a wine is right before bottling. This gives plenty of time for everything to settle out. There is no upside to sweetening the wine before this, only a potential for problems.

The reason clearing the wine is so important is because the wine must become stable before sweetening, otherwise all the new sugars will end up as fodder for a renewed fermentation.

Cloudiness in a wine usually indicates it still has excessive wine yeast. It is very hard to stabilize a wine that has residual wine yeast still floating throughout the wine.

Potassium sorbate is what has to be used to stabilize a wine when sugar is being added. While either potassium metabisulfite or Campden tablets should be used as well, each is not sufficient enough on its own to stabilize the wine.

Potassium sorbate stabilizes a wine in an entirely different way than any type of sulfite. It does so by putting a restrictive coating on the outside surface of each of the few remaining yeast cells. This does not necessarily kill the yeast. They will die on their own in hours or days. But it makes them unable to reproduce themselves. The ability to reproduce is the real threat that can manifests itself as full-blown fermentation.

If your wine is still even slightly visually cloudy, there may not be enough potassium sorbate to go around to do a complete stabilization. This is the downside to sweetening/stabilizing the wine sooner the necessary.

Danny V's Wine Making Tips

We are quite impressed at the quality of wines folks are bringing into Barley & Vine for us to try and to comment on. To help if you have questions about your wine, feel free to stop by the shop with a sample if you have questions about whether it is ready to be bottled. Please be sure to also bring the original gravity of your wine and the type of yeast you used.

#1 - Remember that time is the secret ingredient to making good wine.
#2 - Always allow your wine to thoroughly clear before bottling. You should be able to see through it. This often requires 2-6 months in the secondary.
#3 - Always condition your clear, finished wine with Potassium (not sodium) Meta-Bisulfite AND Potassium Sorbate. This both stabilizes your wine (keeps it from re-fermenting and causing your bottles to explode) and keeps your wine from oxidizing.
#4 - Always thoroughly clean your wine bottles inside and out. Also sanitize your bottles before filling. Potassium Meta-Bisulfite makes a great sanitizer.