HOUSEHOLD NOTES July/August 2010

Do-it-yourself country wines
Forget the grapes - the choices are endless



We have a guest columnist for Household Notes this issue. Tony Rhinelander, a subscriber from Tracyville, N.B. sent us the following story about his homegrown winemaking experience. We hope his tale will encourage readers to try this at home.

"In an earlier age, many country homes had a specialty wine, stashed away in bottles in the cellar, which was brought up and opened for special visitors. But it wasn't made from grapes. Canadians have become complacent about wine. We buy it in the liquor store (at a jaw-dropping 130 percent mark-up over cost) when we can just as easily make it ourselves for almost nothing.
"We're also conditioned to think of drinkable wines as being made only from grapes. But grapes are overrated. Why did they become the fruit of choice for making wine? Grapes contain more sugar than almost any other fruit, and more sugar produces more alcohol. From grapes, one could make a drink with a self-preserving 10-14 percent alcohol content and with perfect acid content. Alcohol, like sugar or salt or vinegar in sufficient concentration, prevents spoilage - an important consideration before refrigeration. Other fruits (such as apples, pomegranates, plums, and wild berries) naturally contained less sugar, and were usually less acidic, so their fermented juice spoiled more easily (i.e., turned into vinegar.)
"One problem: grapes need lots of sunshine and water to produce the sugar. Maritimers are well aware of the climatic obstacles to growing wine grapes. Although some varieties can survive in cooler and gloomier climates, without sufficient sunshine their juice simply is not as good for winemaking as those grown in the Republic of Georgia (grape wine's original home), France, or California.
"Why stick with grapes for wine-making? Although other fruits are less sweet and need their sugar contents boosted, white sugar is widely available and works well. (Honey works, but overwhelms fruit flavors and produces "mead" or "metheglin.") And the variety of tastes among fruits is vast, far wider than among varieties of grapes. Wine connoisseurs recommend a wine because it has "hints" of pears or apricots or orange blossoms. Why not, then, make a wine directly from those fruits or flowers?
"Country folk in England discovered that sugar imported from the colonies opened up all sorts of wine-making possibilities. In New England and the Maritimes they tried out the old English recipes, and they worked.
"I was introduced to home-made wine as a youngster visiting English cousins in the 1960s. Every spring, cousin Mark and his family went out picking elderflowers that grew wild in great profusion along the river Cam, from which he made a delicious, golden, delicately-flavored, perfumed wine. I had no idea you could make your own wine, dry or sweet according to taste, as good as any purchased variety. He presented me with a copy of his recipe book, "Home-made Wines, Syrups, and Cordials," published in 1954 by England's National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI).
"Since then we have made wine at home from fruits we've picked in season: blueberries, elderberries, plums, apples, Red currants, cherries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, high-bush cranberries; from flowers: dandelions, elderflowers, goldenrod; from vegetables: rhubarb, parsnips, ginger. We haven't come close to exhausting my treasured NFWI recipes. We have yet to try fruit wines from rosehips, loganberries, hawthorn berries; flower wines from purple clover, meadowsweet, marigolds; vegetable wines from pea pods, potatoes, lettuce (arugula, anyone?); cereal wines from rice, wheat, corn; tree wines from birch sap, oak leaves, willow bark (aspirin with your wine, Sir?).
"An embarrassment of riches. Our favorite is blueberry wine, which we've been making from our own berries ever since we moved to the farm from Fredericton."
"Most people who haven't made wine at home are hesitant to try. The how-to books make it sound complicated. Wines made from kits are often undrinkable, and little wonder - inexpensive wine kits consist of leftover, concentrated, treated grape juice. On the other hand, natural fruit or flowers have no additives, picking them is an outdoor family affair, and making wine from them is as simple as making bread. Mostly, the wine makes itself. The tiny yeast plants like to be left alone, at room temperature, to feed on the sugar molecules, from which they produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. All they need is to be free of oxygen during the process (so they don't produce vinegar), but that turns out to be easy.
"There are three basic steps to making fruit wine: extract the juice and sweeten it; ferment the sweetened juice (the "must") with yeast; and rack the wine (siphon it off the sediment, called lees.)
"So long as the equipment (pails, plastic tubing, glass jars, bottles) are clean and oxygen is kept away from the fermenting must, it is almost impossible to go wrong.
"The great thing about home-made wine, besides the minimal cost, is that the taste of the particular fruit or flower or vegetable is always a pleasant surprise, a unique bouquet and flavor. "Chacun à son gout" - so if you find you don't care for your dandelion wine, try a different flower next time. Over time, each country home develops its own distinctive house wine."

Local Produce Wine

"This recipe, taken from "Home-Made Wines, Syrups, and Cordials," is for one gallon of fruit, flower, or vegetable wine, about six bottles' worth. To make a larger quantity (e.g., if you have a five-gallon glass carboy) simply multiply the ingredients by five (except for the yeast: since yeast grows, one packet will do five gallons as well as one). The recipe can be adapted to whatever you have on hand. Outlined here are instructions on how to make Wild blueberry and goldenrod wines."

WILD BLUEBERRY WINE

4 pound blueberries
1/4 teaspoon pectic enzyme
4 pound sugar
1 lemon
1 gallon water
yeast

Crush the berries. Sprinkle on pectic enzyme (to encourage fruit cells to release their juice) and let stand in a clean plastic pail for two to three days, stirring regularly. Press the mixture and strain to get pure fruit juice. For flowers or vegetables, pour boiling water over them to make the juice, let sit until cool, then strain.
Dissolve sugar in boiling (unchlorinated) water; cool, then add to juice in pail.
Add the juice of a lemon, unless the fruit is naturally quite acidic (a good acid balance is important for wine quality).
When the mixture is at room temperature, add one package (one teaspoon) yeast, dissolved for 15 minutes in 1/2 cup body-temperature water (wine yeast is best, but bread yeast will work).
Cover the mixture in a pail with a loose-fitting plastic top or loosely tied sheet of plastic; let primary fermentation proceed at constant room temperature (20 degrees C works well).
When the bubbling has slowed down, in about a week, stir and pour the mixture into a clean one-gallon glass jug, to one inch from top, and insert an air lock (to allow CO2 to escape but keep out oxygen). Our predecessors used sterilized cotton wool to plug the neck, which works most of the time, but a plastic air lock filled with water, readily available, works without fail.
Leave the mixture for a secondary fermentation, also at room temperature. In another week or two it will go "dry" (i.e., the yeast will have consumed all the sugar it can, and the bubbling will have stopped). Taste: if it is too dry, stir in some sugar (one teaspoon or so) and let the fermentation continue for a few more days. When all fermentation is finished (the air lock no longer bubbles), you have wine, although at this stage it is very "nouveau," perhaps still cloudy, and in need of several months' rest.
Carefully siphon the wine off the sediment into a clean one-gallon glass jug, top up with water, re-insert the air lock, put the jug in the cellar, and let it rest and clear.
After several months, siphon the wine off the sediment again into a clean gallon jug. If the wine is not clear, let it sit longer. If clear, bottle the wine into clean bottles. They can be corked (with a hand-corker), or closed with sterilized screw tops, and the bottles rested on their sides in the cellar. Ideally the wine should be left in the bottle for another three or four months, but most people get impatient.

GOLDENROD WINE

2 quarts pressed goldenrod flowers
3 1/2 pound sugar
1/2 pound chopped raisins
6 oranges
1 gallon water
yeast

This recipe involves fermenting of the flower mixture. Put the flowers in a bowl. Squeeze, strain and add the orange juice. Add chopped raisins. Dissolve the sugar in boiling water and pour over mixture in the bowl. When cool, add yeast. Cover loosely and leave five-six days, stirring regularly. Strain mixture, pour into a one-gallon glass jar, and proceed as above after primary fermentation has begun.

Mail your recipes, household hints, and requests to Household Notes, care of Rural Delivery, Box 1509, Liverpool, NS B0T 1K0.