Hard Lessons Learned and Some Meads

I mentioned in my last post that I started off my quest to someday own a winery with failure. I also left off by saying that I had learned a number of lessons. So this post will explain some of those lessons.

Lesson 1: If you think that you have done enough research, keep researching.

Lesson 2: Don’t cut corners with cheaper methods, when you don’t understand how the process works.

Lesson 3: Experience is much more valuable than research.

Okay, so with these lessons learned, I set out to make new and better wine. This time, I made two different batches of mead. Mead is a fermented drink that is very similar to wine, but instead of sugar, honey is used.

The first batch that I mixed was a blackberry mead. I did not follow a recipe, as you will see I do often as these posts continue. My inexperience led me to believe that I could guess and create a mead that would be pretty good.

So I took three pounds of honey and dissolved it in just under a gallon of warm water. I put that in a one-gallon, glass carboy and added about one pound of blackberries. I pitched the yeast and fitted the carboy with an air lock. Then I took the carboy down to the basement.

The airlock is used to keep oxygen out of the carboy, so that the alcohol does not get oxidized.

The second batch was a mead, that I had read a little bit about on the internet. It was a chocolate mead. It sounded different, but it sounded good. The author of the recipe claimed that it was very good, but it needed to be aged for two years. So I mixed all of the ingredients together, put it in a gallon-sized carboy, pitched the yeast, and placed it in the basement.

Several months later I decided that both of the meads ready to bottle. The chocolate mead was still sweat, but I assumed that it would be fine. So I bottled it without using any chemicals that would prevent further fermentation. Both bottlings went well, and I had four bottles of both meads.

Around the holidays, I was able to open the blackberry mead and it turned out fairly dry but fruity. I have one bottle left today, which is being saved for some unknown special occasion.

Months later the bottles of chocolate mead began to push the corks out, and I lost all of those bottles. What seemed to have happened is that fermentation continued inside the bottles. Pressure built up and forced the corks out.

Lesson 4: Always use chemicals to stop fermentation.

In my next post, strange fortune smiles upon me and pineapple wine.

In the beginning...

I will admit that to many it seems crazy, but for years I have dreamt of starting a winery. I believe this to be a bold dream for someone who is only 21 years of age. Also, I am not really sure what has inspired this dream, other than curiosity and a desire to understand things that I have never done.

I hope to use this blog to explain my processes, ideas, and struggles. I also plan to start from the beginning and explain what I have already done, then to keep the blog up to date. So here we go...

In the beginning, there was only a dream, a dark basement workshop, and a small amount of money. You know the dream already. The basement workshop had long been vacant, and transformed into storage. But there was a sturdy workbench in the corner that seemed like a great place to put the wine rack and all the necessary equipment.

I needed to understand how the whole wine making process worked. I started by talking to my grandfather, who had dabbled in making wine several times. His approach was very simple, take some fruit, crush it to get the juice, add sugar, add yeast, and add more sugar to adjust the alcohol and sweetness levels as you go. Seemed simple enough, seemed cheap too!

Just to get a second opinion I googled wine making. I spent hours reading everything that I could, and learned a lot about wine, but most of what I learned made the assumption that I had a lot of fancy equipment. So I figured that I would just opt to make wine Grandpa’s way.

So on June 1^st, 2009, I picked eight pounds of strawberries, cleaned, de-stemmed, crushed, and placed them in an old crock. I then took that crock and put it in the basement, and pitched some wine making yeast that I had purchased.

Despite fighting the fruit flies for a week, the process seemed to go well. It was not until several weeks later that white spindle-like growths developed in the wine, and I began to fear that it had spoiled. This was followed by the smell of vinegar. I soon learned that the wine making yeast competed with the natural yeast and most like killed off the wine yeast. The bad yeast fermented the sugars into alcohol, the turned the alcohol into vinegar.

In the end, the wine was no good, but I did learn lessons that I will explain in a later post.