and the Glass Contains

earlier on we had Green Tea & Ginger with our smoked haddock chowder.

And when it all went quiet the 18 month old rosehip and cinnamon came out to play. It's fruity and warming. I think it will probably benefit from more time in the bottle, there's still 6+ left. Wish I could describe the flavour better but it kind of defies pinning down. The warmth comes from the ABV me thinks, around 14-15%. It tastes kind of like a rosé, perhaps no surprise, but is very smooth and rounded. Not very interesting, but acceptable. Probably too strong for it's quite delicate flavour. The cinnamon just isn't showing up.

Sometimes you just tidy up

and today was such a day, tidying up the room that I call the brewery, and washing bottles, DJ's and siphon tubes. Still it's all good preparation for what I hope will be bountiful elderflower wine brewing soon. And it was made fun by sharing a bottle of Green Tea & Ginger wine with my better half.

Even tho I say it myself, this is a cracking wine. One of the best I make, and what a great decision to make 5 gallons of it, still 4 Gallons left ... woohoo!

Time Passes

Tonight I'm thinking, hey I haven't written in the blog for some time. So tonights ramble is that I'm enjoying some pomegranate juice wine (made form cartons of juice). It was great to go to the wine rack when I felt like a nightcap, and not have to take an age wondering which wine I can pull out for a quaff without denting the "cellar" of good stuff.

So, it's a very decent plonk, and I'm glad I made it.

Kit Decisions

Not content with deciding upon scaling up, I made another decision. My country wines are all going to be whites or rosés, I'm not going to try making reds. I'm not sure I have the patience for Elderberry wine, aging for 2 years+. Blackberry and Blackberry & Elderberry wines are delicious, but in my opinion they are more like a robust or big rosé than a red.

However I do like red wine, and I want to brew it. So I decided that I will continue to make Red Wine Kits. Today I picked up a Beaverdale Vieux Chateau Du Roi. Only a gallon as I can't afford more. This is widely and reliably reported to be the closest thing you'll get to Chateau Neuf Du Pape but in a kit. So I'll do the patience bit for this wine, a year should be good enough tho if my patience can hold out for longer then I'm sure it'll be rewarded. At £2/bottle it feels like a steal.

Scaling up

Sometimes you get to a point on a learning curve when you have a decision to make, I've been hovering around making that decision for some months, but today I decided.

Last year I made 4 gallons of Elderflower wine and it was a stunner. Shortly after making it I learned that I could make the same volume of wine using only a fraction of the flowers. The trick is to add the flowers later into the ferment. Apparently this avoids so much of the volatile flavours being blown out of the airlock while the ferment is vigourous. I suspect the increased level of alcohol in the must is a good solvent for said molecules, better than water alone anyway, and that this adds to the effect. So I had to decide, pick less flowers and make the same amount, or scale up. Scale up won out.

So today I bought myself a new 5 gallon fermenting vessel, with a wide neck and an airlock. I'll now be able to add my flowers, in muslin bags, during secondary fermentation. Getting them out will be no probs, and I wont be fiddling about with single gallon demijohns and sieves. I'll probably still do a similar batch to last year; flowers in at primary stage etc. Ensuring that I get a true comparison of the methods. All in all there could be as much as 10 gallons this year.

Bottling Tonight

We're all out of quickie pomegranate juice wine, so I'm bottling the next gallon.