Into the Secondary

The strawberry guava, lemongrass ginger, and passion fruit wines are now in the secondary and finishing up.  We're happy with the taste, smell, and color.

Newest wines in the secondary.

Passionfruit >> Persimmon

Yesterday we dumped out more wine than we made.  Eight gallons of persimmon wine required attention.  The first 3 gallon batch was over treated with vanilla.  The five gallon batch had "the funk" and showed no sign of improvement at 8 months.  I've got one more idea to try on persimmons and if that doesn't work, our persimmons will be reserved for cookies and bread and deer chow from now on.

Lemongrass Ginger wine

The lemongrass ginger wine is in the secondary and looking good.  The strawberry guava is chugging along as well.  I expect another 2-3 days before we can move it to the secondary.

Passion Fruit must

We started a batch of passion fruit wine today.  This batch used 2# 13oz of pulp, basically our entire 2014 harvest.  I reserved a bit for use in the secondary, and we're trying QA 23.  It is supposed to get really cold today and this week, so we may have to bring the primary upstairs to keep it moving along.  here is the planned recipe:

2# 13oz passion fruit pulp, frozen

1 can Welch's white grape concentrate

1# 8oz sugar

Kmeta or 1 campden

7 pints water

1t pectic

2g Bentonite

1g Booster Blanc

Lalvin QA 23

GoFerm 1tsp

Fermaid K 1/4 tsp, divided.

Thaw just enough to remove about 4oz pulp and reserve for use in the secondary. While fruit is thawing, add Kmeta. Allow to thaw overnight. The next morning, add sugar, concentrate to primary. Bag the pulp, reserving any juice, and add bagged fruit and juice to primary. Heat 7 pints water, and add to primary, mixing thoroughly to dissolve the sugar. When cool, add 1tsp pectic enzyme and 1g Booster Blanc. Wait 12 hours, adjust pH (this required 2.25tsp of calcium carbonate to move the pH from 2.75 too 3.25), then add starter of QA 23. Add bentonite after 2 days and add Fermaid K at end of lag phase and at 1.050-1.060 range. 

Rack to secondary when SG under 1.010. Rack again when fermentation complete. After second racking, add the reserved 4oz passion fruit pulp and leave for about a month. Rack off the extra pulp. Cold stabilize, then after 6 months clarify, stabilize, backsweeten, bottle.

For dinner, Salsa Soup which comes from our good friend Constance:

2# hamburger

2 pkg taco seasoning

2 pkg ranch dressing mix

16oz can each of kidney beans, pinto beans, black beans, diced tomatoes

1 can Rotel

2 cans shoe peg corn

2 cups water

Brown the hamburger, drain.  Then toss everything in the crock pot and simmer for 6 hours.

Guava and Lemongrass-Ginger Wines

We have two new, promising wines going on this New Year's Day.  My first-every wine was from guava, a blend of strawberry guava (Psidum littorale v. Longipes), lemon guava (Psidum littorale v. Littorale), and dwarf guava (Psidium guajava nana).  Although difficult to clear, it was wonderful wine.

Since then, the dwarf guava died, and the lemon guava tree was dug up and removed from the greenhouse.  The strawberry guava has continued happily on, leaving me with 23# of frozen fruit.  As before, we used a sketchy online recipe, only this time with about 60 other batches of  winemaking experience.  Per the recipe, and violating convention, we boiled the fruit, tweaking the fruit up to 5#/gallon.

Bagged fruit

We drip-drained the bagged fruit, added water to 3 gallons, added tannin, citric acid, and sugar.  Once cooled, we added pectic enzyme, followed by Booster Blanc; we want to preserve the fruit aromas and color as much as possible. Then it got covered with Saran Wrap and into the fridge for a 3 day cold soak.

Last night I pulled it out to warm up.  We nailed the pH at 3.31.  SG was a bit low at 1.081 so we added another 9 ounces of sugar.  Then we hit it with bentonite and a good starter of QA 23.

After cold soak, with the yeast starter on top.

Strawberry guava could turn out to be a very nice rose style wine.

At the same time we started Lemongrass-Ginger batch number three.  The lemongrass for all of my wines comes from a start given to me by my greenhouse friend and fellow Puerto Rico fruit hunter Jay Cotterman.  It grows like crazy in the greenhouse.  The original online recipe is pretty good, but not lemony enough for me.  With my last batch I doubled the lemongrass, which helped, but this was offset by some super-potent candied ginger.  The second batch, if carbonated, could pass for ginger ale.

Missouri-grown lemongrass

So this batch doubled the lemongrass again.  We're now up to 500g of lemongrass for a 3 gallon batch.  We dropped the fresh ginger, threw in a greenhouse Meyer lemon (juice and rind), and cut back the candied ginger to only 50g.  The grass was twice boiled, strained, bagged.

Lemongrass-ginger wine must

We nailed the SG at 1.089 and the pH was fine at 3.27.  We added pectic, tannin, and acid (citric and tartaric), and then a starter of K1-V1116.  Today, after 4 days, we're at 1.040.  I added the bentonite and the last of the nutrient.  It is pretty cold here, and the draft out of the crawl space is keeping this fermentation temp down nicely at 16.9C.  Good stuff.

We've got some additional wine planning to do today while watching football.  After seven tries, we've yet to make what I think is a really good batch of persimmon wine.  We have two bags left in the freezer from 2014.  Drawing inspiration from one Gary Weaver, we may try a small 1 gallon batch using boiled fruit, possibly with oak in the primary, using some of the remaining elderberries.  We've got more starfruit on the way, and the next batch of carambola will see some acid tweaks.  Finally, we're excited to try the QA 23 on a batch of passionfruit wine.  So much to do!

Drinking White Wine in the Sun

For the second time in a month, the Pierces are together for the holiday.  This time we headed south.  Marathon, Florida is much nicer than Fulton in the winter.

Monday we tried some snorkeling, and it was quite nice.  Captain Kevin Johnsen put us on several good reefs.  Highlights included moray eel, rays, sharks, barracuda, lobster, and countless different types of reef fish.

 Chili-lime fresh shrimp and rum-soaked grilled pineapple with a citrus rum sauce made a great dinner early in the week.

  Captain Kevin took the boys out again a second time later in the week.  Just for posterity: Snapper (Lane, Yellowtail, Mangrove, Mutton, Schoolmaster), Ladyfish, Nassau Grouper, Blue Striped Grunt, Cero Mackerel, Porgy, and a shark.

We ended up with 5-6 pounds of fish.  It made for a somewhat unconventional Christmas Eve dinner of fish tacos.

 This is, in part, a wine blog.  Thanks to Joy, we celebrated with a bottle of Schnebly Guava wine.   Schnebly is perhaps the most well-known of the tropical fruit wine producers.  We were very impressed with this wine.  It's a lovely rose color, not too sweet, and surprising strawberry element.  We'll be having this one again.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Thanksgiving

For the first time in ages, all of the Pierce kids, Allie, Jake, and Adam, home at the same time.  Betty and Jake's friend Charli came, too.  It was a great Thanksgiving, and yes, it did involve a little wine and a little food.

We bottled Joe and Barb's loquat wine.  This wine is very interesting.  The fruit comes from Joe and Barb's loquat tree to the north of their house.  Jeanna and Charlie helped pick the fruit, and Barb carefully packaged the frozen loquats and shipped them so that they arrived in perfect shape.

When thawed and fermenting, loquat wine smells unmistakably like amaretto.  That is why some recipes call for the addition of almonds in the secondary.  The amaretto smell fades however, and by the time this wine was a couple of months old, unfortunately, the smell was gone.  I was left with a decent wine which was very troublesome to clear.  Time did the trick, and finally, at 16 months, it was ready for tweaks and bottling.

The tweaks were centered on restoring that amaretto smell the loquat had early on.  I bench tested almond extract and backsweetened, but finally settled on simply flavoring it with a tiny bit of amaretto liqueur...just enough to pick up the smell and hopefully no extra bitterness.  I figured that it was justified since after all, amaretto is Italian.

 

We also finally got around to my 5 gallons of white catawba.  This was hand made straight from grapes from the Books vineyard down the road.  This wine was challenging, however, because by the time Lisa and I got there to pick the ends of the rows, the grapes are a little past their prime, as the pH was a ridiculous 2.93.  What I should have done was adjust the pH right at the beginning.  I didn't know better, and I forged ahead, pressing the grapes and fermenting off of the skins for a straight white wine.

It was sharp!  So I tweaked.  In an effort to get some balance, I backsweetened it a lot.  I also gave it a tropical twist with a slight infusion of passionfruit in an attempt to counter the foxiness.  In the end, it came out pretty good.  It won't be a wine for pasta meals.  More likely a wine for spritzers and spicy Asian food.

We experimented with food as well.  We had the usual Pierce Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, dressing, strawberry jello, and 7-layer salad.  With the leftovers, we tried a new breakfast idea.  Leftover stuffing is pressed into a muffin tin to make a thick crust. Then an egg is cracked into the center.  We topped with leeks and cheddar cheese.  Bake for about 20 minutes or until the egg white is cooked.  Excellent.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Fruit. Cake.

It was a productive day.  For the last several weeks, weekends have been consumed by work work.  Today the work work was put aside early in favor of fun work.

This morning, we made wine.  So far, we have 2 3-gallon batches of Allison's Elderberry.  Both are stunning, deep, inky blue-black color and while young, they taste fantastic.  The first batch is oaking now.  The batch we started today is the second run Elderberry Rose.  The recipe calls for body from bananas, and we used Dwarf Red bananas from the greenhouse.  The taste and flavor are very promising.

Last year we found the world's best fruitcake recipe.  This is not the fruitcake with the radioactive green and red candied fruit.  This is rich, delicious, from-scratch fruitcake.

Today we made this year's fruitcake.  Probably too much fruitcake.  We quadrupled the recipe.  Upon reflection, perhaps last year we only doubled the recipe.  Oh well.  It will keep.

This fruitcake macerates apricots, golden raisins, cherries, blueberries, dates, cranberries, candied ginger, and citrus zest in rum overnight.  Then add just a little butter, flour, sugar, and spices, followed by some flour and eggs.

While waiting on the fruitcake, we had pan-seared roasted garlic and rosemary lamb chops for supper.  This was paired with a Sonoma Pinot Noir Forty-Seven Friends which was excellent.

My favorite part of the fruitcake recipe is the brandy.  The idea is that this fruitcake "ages."  Sort of like wine.  So you have to be patient.  While aging, it is spritzed with brandy every few days.  We use a homemade peach brandy made by one of Lisa's patients.

We'll have family and friends home for Thanksgiving this year.  We just might eat a little fruitcake.

2014 Persimmons

In our yard sits the largest largest persimmon tree (Diospyros virginiana) I've ever seen.  For years we let the deer, raccoons, dogs, and any other critter eat all they wanted.  We occasionally made some bread and cookies from the persimmon pulp.  When I started winemaking, persimmon wine seemed like a good idea.

It turns out that, at least for me, persimmon wine is the most difficult of all wines to make.  The first difficulty came in managing the skins and seeds.  Some recipes suggest that you remove the seeds to avoid excessive tannins.  Anyone who has picked truly ripe American persimmons knows that when ripe, the fruit has the consistency of baby food.  Once frozen and thawed, the seeds and skins and pulp are just mixed together in a big gooey mess.  I managed that by just throwing the whole lot in a mesh bag.  It turns out that concerns about excess tannins are unwarranted.

Persimmon wine has an unbelievable amount of pulp.  In my batches, easily 1/3 and sometimes 1/2 of the initial volume is lost as pulp.  Getting the volume right has taken some doing.

Finally, unattended, my persimmon wine tends to develop a smell on about the third day of fermentation that can best be described as that of an old gym bag.  This smell diminishes minimally over time, so if there is any significant degree of what Lisa and I call "the funk," the wine is ruined.  Dealing with "the funk" has been the greatest challenge.  Using K1-V1116 wine yeast, step feeding the nutrients, and strict control of fermentation temperature proved to be the answer.

So yesterday we picked the first of the 2014 persimmons.  I have room in the freezer for about 50 pounds, which should be enough for a couple of 3 gallon batches and some persimmon bread as well.

For a 3 gallon batch:
16# persimmons
3 cans Welch's white grape concentrate or Apple concentrate
Sugar: 5-6#, aim for OG 1.085
Campden:4 tabs
Yeast nutrient: 3t stepwise
Yeast energizer: 3/4t
Tannin: 1t
Pectic enzyme: 12t divided
Acid blend: 3T-4T, aim for pH of 3.3-3.4
4.5 gal water
Bentonite

Freeze fully ripe fruit in 1 gallon Ziplocks, 4#/bag.  Thaw 4 bags, 16# of fruit.  As soon as the fruit starts to thaw, add one crushed and dissolved Camden tab to the bag and work it through the fruit.  8 hours later, add 2t pectic to each bag, mix thoroughly, and wait 12 hours.  When fully thawed, add to nylon mesh straining bag and put in primary.  Boil the water, add 5# sugar, and add to primary, along with the concentrate and tannin.  Let cool, then add 4t pectic and 3T acid blend.  Wait 12 hours.  Make any acid or sugar adjustments to get pH 3.3-3.4 and OG at 1.085.  Add the energizer, make a yeast starter and pitch the yeast.  At the end of lag phase add 1t yeast nutrient, then add the second and third teaspoons at about 1/3 and 1/2-2/3 sugar depletion.  Use ice packs to keep the temp around 20-21C.  Add 5g bentonite at the end of fermentation day 3.  Usual care thereafter.