Last of the summer wine - Part 2

If you've read my last blog post you will know that I had started off a 'hedgerow' wine and had departed for a week away at work.  Well, I returned from working in Leeds full of excitement and apprehension as to how my 'must' would be. I know, this is really sad, but this is how I am and I make no apologies for that!  I said my obligatory hellos to the family and went straight into the garage to peel the lid off of the brewing bin.  Arrrggg, mould!  This is was what I was worried about, cunningly however, I was prepared for this blow as I had done some research on the Internet in advance and found that this was common, love you Internet!  So I removed this from the top and crossed my fingers and hoped it wouldn't affect the taste.  Speaking of taste, Gayle and I tried the 'juice' and it was very nice indeed and would have made a really nice soft drink.  But stuff that!  I want wine ;-)

After sterilising a couple of demijohns, the next thing I had to do was to remove the fruit pulp (along with the mould) from the must using a regular sieve.  I then used a sterilised tube to syphon the must into the sterilised demijohns.  As there were a lot of small pieces of fruit pulp left in the must I tried to use some muslin cloth to remove it.  This was a pain in the backside as the pulp clogged up the muslin to the point where it stopped the flow altogether!  This meant I had to keep washing the muslin in a sterilised solution to remove the pulp, hence the bucket next to the demijohn in the picture, and the mess, and the annoyed wife just out of shot!  This led me to the conclusion that the next time I would put the fruit into a straining bag at the start of the must which would let all of the flavour develop but keep the pulp out.  Everyday's a school day!

Once I had been thorough this rigmarole I checked the specific gravity (SG) of the must.  If you don't know what this is then basically, in brewing terms, it shows you how much sugar you have in your must and therefore the potential alcohol content.  I discovered that although there was enough sugar to make the must taste pleasant there was not nearly enough to make the alcohol content fun!  No problem, I added some more sugar to each of the demijohns and shook to dissolve (please note I have updated the recipe to include twice the amount of sugar so you would not need to add extra).  I then added one teaspoon of yeast (which I had activated in some luke warm water) to each of the demijohns with a teaspoon of yeast nutrient and have them another good shake.  Next the airlocks go in and the demijohns went into a warm place so the yeast can come to life and get to work on the sugar.

I love the next bit as this is where nature takes over.  After a couple of days the airlocks were bubbling like mad and you could see the bubbles of CO2 rising up the side of the bottles and making the bits of fruit pulp dance around.  You can see the fruit pulp has formed a crust on top of the must in the picture opposite.  After about a week this crust will have settled on the bottom and this is the time to rack the wine off (fnarr!) into some clean demijohns to remove this excess sediment.

Now all you have to do is wait for the bubbles to stop appearing in the airlocks which means either all of the sugar has been turned to alcohol or the  yeast has run out of steam and died.  This took about two weeks and now it was time for a first taste of the the wine!!  It was incredibly dry which ment all of the sugar had been turned to alcohol, which is a good thing, but country wines do not have the 'vinosity' of commercially produced wines and if they are too dry they are not very palatable.  And wine has be to pleasant to drink or what's the point, so it needed sweetening up.  As the yeast was probably still active, just adding more sugar would have started the fermentation process again so I added one crushed Camden Tablet to each demijohn which should kill the yeast.  After a couple of days the fermentation had stopped so I added 200g of sugar to each of the demijohns and shook until dissolved, and another taste showed that the wine was now much more palatable.  I then added 100ml of brandy (for a chest warming sensation!) and some fining's which are an aid to clear the wine as it is still very cloudy.

That was a couple of days ago and the wine has still not cleared so I'll added another 'dose' of fining's to try and clear the wine, also, it looked like to fermentation has started again so I've added another Camden Tablet to wine.  I suspect that the wine it not clearing because of the fermentation and this has not stopped because I rushed in adding the extra sugar, another lesson learned!

I hope that all of this tinkering will not affect the final quality of the wine, but only time will tell.  Hopefully by next week the wine will have cleared and I can bottle it in the champagne bottles we kept from our wedding!  I need to do this ASAP we have 5 gallons of apple juice that we got from the pressing the apples from Tony & Jane's trees at weekend to make cider, watch this space for that recipe.

Once the wine is ready to bottle I'll let you know how it drinks! :-)