52 bottles of wine.

[Gary350]

I'm not sure how to make wine, but its just as good to make friends with a wine maker! I'm looking forward to see what comes of the 50 lbs. of honey I gave to my neighbor. He makes a blackberry / mead - he wanted local blackberry honey to go with the local blackberries. I can't wait to see what comes back!

WOW that is going to be good wine.

I have made mead it is probably the best wine a person can make flavored with your favorite fruit. I made some Pomegranate Mead wine 3 years ago won best of show in the local wine contest. This is expensive wine to make Pomegranate juice and honey are both $15 a quart. I made a very small batch. I also made some Persimmon Mead too, wow that was excellent wine. I wish I have 50 lbs of honey I would have about 25 gallons of mead going within a few weeks.

[Gary350]

OK, now forgive me if this is a dumb question, but would you be able to make a non-alcoholic wine? This would be a very good product for folks who cannot have alcohol.

Yes you can. Make wine then when it is finished boil it in a pan to remove the alcohol. You can do this with store bought wine. Hold a match over the boiling wine the flame from the match will try to ignite the alcohol as it boils off. When the flame no longer tried to ignite the alcohol is gone. If you know your chemistry and have a very good accurate thermometer the wine will boil at 185 deg F that is about the boiling temperature of alcohol. After all the alcohol boils off the temperature will go up to 212 deg F. When the temperature goes up alcohol is gone. You can use a pressure cooker as a mini still pipe the vapor through copper tubing it turns to 90% alcohol clear as water.

Long ago wine was given to the sick because it is predigested food and the body can use it without using any energy. Sick people are extremely low on energy so wine is excellent food but alcohol limits how much a person can drink. Alcohol is boiled off then given to the sick. Next time your extremely sick give it a try it really works. Way back 100s of years ago wine was typically 4% to 6% alcohol at the most wine was made from fruit and fruit juice with natural sugar. Now days hybide grapes can produce wine with higher alcohol and if you add sugar you increase the alcohol even higher.

[Gary350]

Thanks, RBG, that sounds really easy!

I wonder why you simmer it . Maybe it adds flavor, or concentrates these existing flavor.

All fruit has wild yeast plus there is yeast floating round in the air. If you leave any juice setting around the house at room temperature in a week or so it will start to ferment. Yeast is easy to kill heat the juice to 160 deg F simmer for 5 minutes then let it cool.

[Handsomeryan]

I have an apple tree but it does not make good wine.

Wine made from apples is thin and even if the flavor is okay the mouth feel isn't. The best use for apples in making an adult beverage is to make Graff. Technically a cider since it is made of apples but because it is malted and hopped it brews and drinks more like a beer.

I've personally brewed about 25 gallons of the stuff with the ingredients for gallons 26-30 sitting in my basement waiting on me to brew them.

Amazingly good stuff!

GRAFF

Materials needed for a 5 Gallon Batch

Ale yeast (Nottinham or Safale-05)
.5 lbs of Crystal 60L Malt (available from the internet or your local home brew shop)
1 oz of torrified wheat (optional, head retention)
4 Gallons of apple juice (make sure it doesn't have any preservatives in it)
1 gallon of water
2 lbs of Dry Malt Extract (I use amber or dark, doesn't seem to make a big difference)
0.5 oz of you favorite hops around 6%AA (Cascade is ideal for this)

Directions for brewing:

Steep the 60L and torrified wheat in .75 gallons of water @ 155 degrees for 30 mins.
Sparge with .25 gallons 170 degree water and throw away grains.
Add DME and bring to a boil.
Add hops when boiling starts and boil for 30 mins.

Cool down the wort (if you choose not to cool the wort and just let the AJ do the cooling then your cider won't be as clear). Pour the wort and apple juice into your carboy and pitch yeast.

Ferment 2 weeks at 64-68 degrees then keg or bottle.

Try this. You'll thank me later.

[Runningtrails]

I make wine all the time, from all kinds of things! I have dandelion wine aging now, as well as lilac, maple, mint, apple and banana. I am currently drinking rose petal and sugar snap pea pod wine. Today I started 5 gallons of rhubarb. It will go into the primary tomorrow morning after it cools.

It's so easy and good! I have not made a bad wine yet. I love it! Hubby and I cannot drink wine with sulphite, so this has enabled us to drink wine again!

I wrote a book entitled "Making Organic Wine At Home". It's free and downloadable from my site, in my signature. It's just free, honest.
No strings attached.

[rainbowgardener]

I'm resurrecting this thread, because I got inspired. I never did make the dandelion wine last year, because it's hard collecting enough dandelions a few at a time and saving them.

So I was thinking about flower wines and what flowers do I have in large quantities.... LILACS! My gigantic old lilac is covered in blossoms now, just opening up. I dead head it every year when the blossoms are done and get gallons and gallons of flowers. So I will pick some of them this year before they are spent, and try my hand at lilac wine. Doesn't it sound amazing!?

[rainbowgardener]

So I have about a gallon of lilac must (wine precursor) sitting around fermenting! It started out kind of grey-lavender and cloudy, but as it sits is turning a lovely clear pale pink. Currently it smells very yeasty, you would think I was making beer or bread...

Now I have plans for honeysuckle wine, mulberry wine, and of course lavender wine!

Still debating whether to start a bunch more of the lilac, since the gigantic lilac tree probably has enough flowers on it to make 100 times as much. But I've never done this before and don't know how it will turn out. So I think I will stop and maybe just make some lilac jelly/ syrup and dry some for potpourri.


If the lilac wine turns out really nice, next year I can make a bunch of gallons of it.

This wine making thing may call for more patience than I can muster up! If I'm lucky, I will have a few bottles of wine ready to give as Christmas presents, starting now. The projects I like usually go quicker than that!

[applestar]

I was waiting for your followup!
Sounds good -- Keep us posted.

[rainbowgardener]

I will, but don't sit around holding your breath! It will be at least close to Christmas before I will even know how this turned out. The lilac flowers infused for a couple days. Then you strain them out add sugar and yeast, etc. then it ferments for at least a week, closed up. Then you rack it, draw it off leaving sediment behind, into a fermentation jug with airlock for a month. Then you keep racking it once a month for about three months or until there is no more sediment and no more bubbling. THEN you can bottle it and cork it and then you let it age at least 3 months, preferably more like 6.....

Like I said, tries my patience. I want to know NOW if I'm going to even like this stuff... sigh...

[rainbowgardener]

So I siphoned off the wine into my homemade fermentation chamber. A regular plastic 1.5 gal canister (sold I think for storing cereal in) with a lid. I poked a hole in the lid and pulled a balloon through it. Put some pin pricks in the balloon. That's the airlock. Not much air can get in through the pin pricks in the collapsed balloon, but if pressure builds up inside from the fermentation, gases will be able to escape. Pretty tricky! They sell fancy airlocks, but when I read about the balloon version was when I got inspired to think I could do this at home.

Anyway, in this process I tasted a little and I am really pleased. It's still a little bit sharp and yeasty, but recognizably wine and with some nice flavor. I think when racked and aged it will be nice. It's always exciting when this stuff actually works!

Now I wish I had made more, this is only about a gallon. There's still lots of lilac flowers, but they are now a bit past their peak. I'm debating about making another batch of lilac or going on to the next thing. Honeysuckle is in bloom now. I have a recipe for honeysuckle wine. Gathering up enough of the little honeysuckle flowers will be more challenging than the lilac....

So much fun!

[rainbowgardener]

I'm so Gemini! I love starting things and learning new things, so I'm already starting to think about what is next...

I have done homemade candles, jellies, syrups, canned tomato sauce and salsa, frozen stuff, dried herbs, made herbal tea blends, distilled essential oils, made hand lotion, now I'm in the middle of wine making.

So what should the next project be, how to use stuff from my garden? (Don't say beer, I can't stand the stuff!)

[GardenGnome]

I don't know about you but I could use a glass of flower wine after reading this.
Yeah I know its 730am ... maybe ill just smell a flower outside. Blackberry wine sounds nice how much do you need for 30 bottles?

[!potatoes!]

so rg, did you buy yeast, or culture your local ones? in my winemaking in recent years, I've realized how easy it is to get a yeast culture going that will drive the entire fermentation of a wine. and fun, for the folks who get a kick out of doing such things.

also; the dandelion wine we started early last april, we bottled in february. after a tiny bit of aging, it's really amazing stuff. complex flavor. it's fermented to dryness, so not sweet from sugars, but there's a floral-based sweetness still there in the flavor. pretty cool. we needed a crew of three to process the flowers to get it started, though. I actually wonder if the lilac wine wouldn't be a little too floral/perfumey for my taste, but my tolerances are low where very scented flowers are concerned, I guess. I vote for more experimentation in wineland, as next project. (though I guess you'd need another vessel to ferment in)...that's what got me - and why I now have 8 1-gallon jugs around - got lucky that we were sampling out a bunch of cider at the store, so they were free.

just started the household's 9th 1-gallon batch of wine two days ago. made with (next) summer in mind: rooibos/lime/ginger.

also: GG: to fill 30 wine bottles, you'd need about 6 gallons, so depending on your recipe (sweetened with honey, as is my wont) you'd need around 12 cups of honey and maybe 18lbs of berries (for good flavor, some would say you could use less)...

[!potatoes!]

also, re-reading this thread that I somehow mostly ignored...in response to gary's comment about dandelions not having much flavor...to make something seem like a wine to our tastes, it needs tannins and acids, neither of which are present in dandelions...but easy to add. citrus juice and peel can add enough acids, raisins or dried apricots can add enough tannins. both tend to be ingredients in flower wines.

[GardenGnome]

Lol maybe ill start with less bottles. I ordered that book that wass listed. Still sounds like fun to make. Now if I could just get how to make french bread right. Id be set its always rock hard.

[GardenGnome]

Lol maybe ill start with less bottles. I ordered that book that wass listed. Still sounds like fun to make. Now if I could just get how to make french bread right. Id be set its always rock hard.