Recipe; Orange & Hawthorn Blossom

If you make a wine that you're not happy with then don't chuck it out. You may just need to give it time, sometimes years. Alternatively you may find it's great for making blends with. This is what I ended up doing with my Hawthorn Blossom Wine. It tasted of nothing, but was dry and strong (15%). I didn't want to chuck it cos it didn't taste bad. So I rummaged about my wines and reckoned that it would blend well with a sweet, strong, full flavoured wine. Orange (aka citrus wine) was the obvious choice.

The first thing to do is mix a bit of each wine together and taste it. Jeez wine making is such a chore sometimes! Starting around 50/50 is as good a choice as any. For me when I did a 50/50 blend I was instantly happy with the result. The sweet strong orange wine seemed to lose nothing at all. While the Hawthorn Blossom was completely absorbed. The result as I saw it was that I now got to make my Orange wine go twice as far! So that was enough for me, I got the measuring jug and funnel out and got blending. So here is a gratuitous piccie, Hawthorn on the left, Orange on the right.

And tonight I made another 6 bottles of this blend, and I'm drinking some, and it's great!

If I lived in a country that permitted distillation of alcohol then I probably would have distilled the Hawthorn Blossom Wine. However that is illegal here, so it wasn't an option. An option that has just occurred to me as I write this is to make Jelly with it. Alcoholic jelly is great adult fun, and those strong jelly flavours would work well with the high alcohol content. I still have a gallon of Hawthorn Blossom wine left and 1/2 gallon of Orange wine. I reckon that some of the Hawthorn blossom will end up being Jelly now, and hey maybe some in a trifle too.

Recipe; Hawthorn Blossom Wine

I've only made this wine once, and I didn't really know what to expect from the flowers when we went picking. I didn't pick bad smelling flowers, but I think I could have picked flowers with a much better smell. The result was disappointing dry, strong, rocket fuel with a neutral taste that I use for blending with sweet, strong, flavourful wines.

Recipe (2 Gallons)

4.5 Litres Hawthorn Blossoms (no twigs, leaves, stems etc)
3kg Sugar
4 Lemons - Zest and Juice
2 Teaspoons Wine Tannin
Nutrient
Sauternes Yeast
2 Campden Tablets

and here's the piccies

Method

Put the flowers in a muslin bag or two. You don't want the bags stuffed, and bags make it really easy to remove the flowers when the time comes. You could use nylon bags instead. Dissolve the sugar in about a gallon of hot boiled water and pour onto the flowers. Add the juice and zest (no pith!) of the lemons and the tannin. Make up to two gallons with water. Add 2 crushed campden tablets, stir well and cover. Leave overnight and the campden will take care of any wild yeasts etc. Next day measure the OG (mine was 1100), stir sloshily to get some gasses dissolved in the must then add your yeast and nutrient and cover. Stir once daily for a few days

About a week later remove the flowers and transfer the wine to secondary fermenter(s). Rack, degas, stabilise etc as and when needed. This one needed finings to clear.

Thoughts

If I do this one again then I'll make sure to pick flowers with a pleasant strong smell. I'll also keep my OG down, about 1080 should be ok. This wine fermented down to a final gravity of 990, which gives a hefty 15% ABV. Dry as a bone, and no flavour to speak of. Hence I've used it for blending.

Orange Wine Recipe

So I've just blended two wines and I want to write about the result, which means that I have to write up the wines that I blended. It's about time I got around to these recipes. The first is Orange Wine, well that's what I have called it for years, but really it's a mixed citrus wine and that's how I refer to it in the list on the page of my brews.

Citrus Wine 

Recipe (3 Gallons)

30 Oranges - Maroc or Helios
16 Clemantines
6 Lemons
2.5 Pink Grapefruit
2 Teaspoons Citric Acid
2 Teaspoons Tartaric Acid
6 Kg Sugar
Nutrient
4 Teaspoons Pectolase
Sauternes Yeast

Here's your piccie

Method

Zest 24 Oranges and 4 lemons. Take great care to avoid collecting the pith with the zest. Squeeze all the rest of the fruit for juice. Dissolve the sugar in hot boiled water. Put all the ingredients into your fermenting vessel apart from the yeast. Make up to 3 gallons with water, cover and allow to cool to less than 30'C. Then measure the OG. This one came in at a hefty 1129! No problem for Sauternes yeast tho. So pitch your yeast, stir sloshily and cover. After a few days transfer to secondary fermenter(s) and fit airlocks. Rack, degas, stabilise etc as and when needed as usual. This wine always clears unaided for me, in a couple or 3 months.

Thoughts

This is a dessert wine. It's very sweet, FG was 1021 and that gave an ABV of around 14.7%. It's good served chilled. If you don't like sweet wines then you'll want to use considerably less sugar.

The list of fruits is not set in stone. You could use jaffas, navels, tangerines, satsumas, mandarins, mineolas, ugly fruit etc. The oranges I chose are good for juicing and thin skinned. The rest I choose based on what is cheap, tastey, juicy and available on the day I go shopping.

Blackberry Kit Grrrrr

Grrrrr because I really thought it was Black Cherry. When I was checking the instructions I kept seeing blackberry and thinking they had printed the berry instructions on the cherry kit. That wouldn't have been a problem 'cos I still have the cherry instructions from the last kit. However when I turned the label over, there it was, plain as day "Blackberry", and here's the gratuitous piccie

So then I was left wondering do I start this kit up, or the Beaverdale Vieux Chateau Du Roi. Which is something like a Chateau Neuf Du Pape clone. Might seem like a no brainer, but it was a tricky decision because out of around 30 DJ's I only have 5 empties, 3 will be needed for the Blueberry & Cranberry Quickie Wine and 1 spare is always good for racking. I want to use the lees from the Beaverdale Kit straight after it finishes fermenting to start another brew. So that would leave me 1 DJ short. So, despite my impatience to try this Beaverdale Kit, I have to hold off.

Anyway, looking on the bright side the blackberry kit holds some excitement. When I read the ingredients label it says, for the juice:

• Concentrated Grape Juice
• Glucose Syrup
• Concentrated Blackberry Juice
• Concentrated Elderberry Juice
• Citric Acid
• Sulphur Dioxide

"Hmm" I thought "that's very similar to the Blackberry & Elderberry Wines (red and rosé) that I made last year". With some obvious exceptions of course like mine were done on the pulp etc. So a comparison will be kind of cute, and how timely is it that I only just described those brews too.

Bottling Again

I've just bottled a gallon of Green Tea & Ginger Wine. So it's standing for a day or so, then the heat shrink sleeves go on and it gets laid down. Not much more to say, I was going to bottle a gallon of the Cheapskate Rosé too, but it's only 3.5 months old so no hurry, tho it should be ready to drink soon enough as it used 3.5 litres of juice per gallon, rather than 4.5 litres.

The Blueberry & Cranberry Rosé is now busily fermenting

Recipe; Elderberry & Blackberry "Rosé" (2nd run)

Finally I've got around to posting the recipe and method for a second run wine. These are fun wines to make, they almost seem like you get something for nothing cos you don't need to buy anymore yeast for them. Tho you will need to buy some juices or concentrates. Still, they are quick and easy to do.

Recipe (2 Gallons)

Lees and Fruit from Previous Wine
245g Can of (Youngs) White Grape Concentrate
245g Can of (Ritchies Spanish) Red Grape Concentrate
Yeast Nutrient
Water to 3 Gallons
Sugar to desired OG

Method

Ok, you're making the Elderberry & Blackberry Wine at the moment and its got to the stage when you're going to remove the fruit (around a week in). Something I love about this way of making wine is that you can be carefree at this stage. So you can decant or siphon the must from the fruit and lees. No need to be careful about the process so you want plenty of yeast in your secondary fermenter for the red wine, but you also want plenty left in the primary fermenter for the 2nd run wine.

So you have left a yucky looking gloop of fruit and yeast (both alive and dead). Bagged all my fruit up in muslin at this stage. It just makes removal later easier. I added enough sugar solution to get me into the 1080 - 1090 range. Then water, nutrient, grape concentrates, gave it a very good stir. Then measured the gravity. 1085. so left it like that and covered it up. 4 days later I removed the fruit then followed all the usual steps of moving to secondary, racking, degassing, stabilising etc.

Thoughts

Making second run wines is great fun. There are basically two types, one uses the lees only (like saves buying yeast or oak chips). I do this with all my quality grape wine kits and make a light version of it with grape juice. The second type is using the fruit again. Tho in reality you probably won't have to ass yeast either. Which is what this wine is all about! The wine that resulted from this was far from a rosé, surprisingly. It's actually a red in it's own right. So this year I may make it again, or I may try to get the rosé I was aiming for. Heck I may do both cos this is good stuff!