JP here. Yes, I think it's probably been over a year since I posted much of anything on here, so don't faint.
We managed to gather quite the wild elderberry harvest this year, much more than what Mrs. JP needs to do a couple of batches of her elderberry jelly, and being the curious and adventurous foodie that I am, I decided that this year I would put that excess of berries to good use and learn the skill of wine making. I read and read information about it, and it is clearly an art that could take years to master, but I found some good information, a good recipe, got the equipment needed and last weekend we set about wine making.
I won't bore you with all of the details. A large part of wine making involves getting the right animate and inanimate things into it and keeping the bad animate and inanimate things out. There is good yeasts and bad yeasts, good acids and bad acids, and on and on. The process of sterilizing gloves, spoons, etc. has become a part of our days.
As we collected elderberries this year, we would freeze them, and then Mrs. JP would go through them to take out any bugs and large stems, put them in a freezer bag and back into the freezer they went. So Friday evening, we put all of the berries into a nylon straining bag, dropped it into a primary fermentor, known in common parlance as a clean, sterilized plastic bucket, boiled some spring water and dissolved the required amount of sugar into it, poured that over the bag of berries in the primary, pressed the berry bag to release juices, then proceeded to add the necessary chemicals.
Day two, more chemicals went in. Day three we woke the wine yeast up by re-hydrating it and encouraging it to procreate and multiply, by feeding it, of all things (hmmmmm? haha). Then, when it had been spurred into all kinds of activity by small additions of must (that's the stuff that is in the primary fermentation bucket, all of that stuff we mixed, the water, the sugar, the berries, the chemicals, whatever, it's all collectively called the must), and was bubbling away happily, we added it into the primary fermentor. Now, we have what's called an S-type air lock on the bucket lid that keeps the oxygen out and lets the excess carbon dioxide out; it kind of burps on a regular basis. I never realized how active the fermentation process is. The must is fizzing like some champagne or old fashioned grape soda pop, and it really bubbles up when we have to stir it.
Once a day, we take the lid off, squeeze the berry bag gently and stir the must. It's supposed to ferment like this for fourteen days, then it gets put into a large carboy bottle to continue to ferment and clarify for six months, at which time we stabilize it, make any minor taste adjustments necessary, bottle it and let it age for a year before we get to try it. Hopefully, we will get some good wine and not some vinegar or cooking wine.
If we do this all over after next year's elderberry harvest, about the time we bottle up the second batch of wine, the first one should be aged and ready to taste. Delayed gratification, I hope!
I have no idea how I'm going to keep twenty some odd bottles of wine sitting on a wine rack at an ideal 55° Fahrenheit for months on end, through spring, summer, fall and winter. I guess I'll have a little over six months to figure that one out. I really hope the temperature thing is an ideal, and not a requirement, because I can't afford a walk in refrigerator right now.
Anyway, as my dearly beloved says at the end of her posts, "Blessings from the holler, y'all!"
