Wine making tips one and two.
You can try for years and home made wine will never taste as
good as a real wine from a Mediterranean country, or more
recently the wines of the Southern hemisphere. OK, occasionally
there is an exception, but the abundance of chemicals used in
making wine at home frequently taints it.
My grandfather who was otherwise a pretty sane chap and fountain
of knowledge, having spent a lot of time in India, started
making his own wine when he retired. My first taste of homemade
wine was when I was about 7 when I was allowed a few sips of his
"vintage" blackberry wine. Even at that tender age I could tell
that it was immensely alcoholic but tasted awful. He belonged to
a wine making "Circle" who used to give out wine making tips to other keen
winemakers. Because all the members used the same chemicals they
did not notice them at their 'tastings'. Anyone used to real
wine would rather have a G&T or a Scotch.
I must admit that later in life I dabbled in winemaking myself.
I should have known better, I know, but living in the English
countryside with often more produce than I needed I decided to
do something with the gluts of apples, pears and other fruits in
the garden, as well as picking blackberries and elderberries
from the local hedgerows.
I invested in a load of gear, bottles, books, corks, demi-johns
and tried to make wine without chemicals, having remembered the
times I had been forced to try various friends' unpalatable
brews, "Oh you must try my carrot wine, it tastes just like
Frascati". (It was more like battery acid and bore no
resemblance to that fine wine).
So I read loads of books, most of which told me to use lots of
chemicals without which one could not make wine, and gave it a
go. A few gallons of apple vinegar (which was great for
cooking), several gallons of funny tasting water and a year or
two later I finally made a small batch of very drinkable
elderberry wine using a port yeast. It was rather like a
half-decent chianti. So having invested in all the equipment,
spent many, many hours picking fruit, washing it, bottling-up,
siphoning-off and all the other numerous tasks necessary in
home-made wine making, I ended up with some very good vinegar
(around 10 years worth) and 7 bottles of drinkable wine.
Nowadays I'm very happy to go to the local shop and get a decent
bottle of the real thing. One of the main problems with homemade
wine is its unknown strength. Yes I know there are various
gadgets for measuring that sort of thing, but that is rather
throwing good money after bad, and if it doesn't really taste
very nice anyway why bother?
Sitting here with a glass of chilled Frascati and a smoked
salmon sandwich I really wish I had taken the two most important
wine making tips before I even started. It would have saved me a
lot of aggravation.
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