Tag Archives: Wine

November is, as you know, Nanowino month. To help celebrate, I’ve started up a new batch of our infamous Apple Wine using several gallons of cider from Wasem’s Fruit Farm. We got it last week, at about the same time we acquired our Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins… If you want to call them pumpkins.

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I’d said I was going to upload these a while ago. Here are the GPS waypoints for Wasem’s fruit farm in both LOC file and GPX file formats.

So we’ve got a new fermenter full of cranberry wine doing the whole primary fermentation thing. Hopefully it’ll turn out as good as the last batch…

Sunday evening I started the whole washing/sorting/crushing routine, using the big winepress to flatten the cranberries, half a bag at a time.

This was an incredibly slow process.
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Boy, did I mess up that time estimate… I figured I’d be able to get the prep-work done for the cherry wine in about an hour, hour and a half tops. With two of us working for the last half of it, it took almost three hours to de-pit two and a half gallons of tart cherries.
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There’s plans afoot for a new batch of wine. Scott H got a couple gallons of tart cherries from a friend of his and handed them over to our tender mercies for winification. I’m sure we’ve got a recipe or two for cherry wine somewhere. This is Michigan after all. If I can’t find one I like, I may just adapt the one we used for the cranberry wine. It turned out pretty tasty…

The cranberry wine is all nice and bottled up. It’s nice and sweet, and this time I made sure to add stabilizer so that it wouldn’t come back to life in the bottle. I also managed to prep the exact number of bottles I needed and just one extra cork.
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Three of the wine batches are pretty much ready to go into bottles. The latest attempts at pumpkin and apple wine are crystal clear, and I’ve put finings in the cranberry, so it should be nicely clarified by the time we get back from up North. All I need to do is scrub out & sterilize the bottles and I’ll be able to spend some of the holiday vacation filling and corking.
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No worries about the apple wine anymore! It took a day or two, but it’s happily bubbling away in the kitchen. Actually, it popped its top yesterday morning while my Wife was putting together some lasagna. (She’s been on a whole meal planning kick that I’m gleefully benefiting from… I’ve even gotten in on it myself, making bean burritos and crockpot turkey chili for lunches for the upcoming week.) Fortunately, she wasn’t carrying around a pan of tomato sauce, noodles, cheese and spinach when the cork blew, or I’d probably still be cleaning the kitchen.
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