Winemaking project: Pictures page 6!

[dragonlaurel]

For peaches that are just like the ones you really love- take a bit of branch from the good tree and try rooting it. It wont hurt anything to try growing from the seeds, but no guarantees on what the new trees will be like.
The peach pits can be crushed and put in a blender then used in skin scrubs. They're great for it.

 

[Emerald]

For peaches that are just like the ones you really love- take a bit of branch from the good tree and try rooting it. It wont hurt anything to try growing from the seeds, but no guarantees on what the new trees will be like.
The peach pits can be crushed and put in a blender then used in skin scrubs. They're great for it.

I haven't tried this yet, but I was told by a member on the gardening forum I am a member of that you can take a peach pit from a tree with good fruits and get a good tree from it!
I have a tree with the best fruit and I saved 3 big pits from it this summer and it is lucky for me that I did as in the last wind storm we had here in MI the whole top of that great peach tree twisted right off and landed on the ground! I have another tree but the peaches were not as yummy as this one and with only one branch left I am not sure if it will make it thru the winter..
But since you mentioned rooting a branch I might have to run out there and try it!!

 

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There aren't too many peaches that grow well here so I'm not too worried about it. I am allergic to peaches but can eat them peeled and cooked, so they go straight into pies and cobblers and crisps....and now, wine! So anything that grows from those pits will likely be just fine.

I tested all three wines that are still in the primaries and only the watermelon was ready for the secondary. The watermelon had a specific gravity....remember, that has to do with how much sugar is in the solution, how active the ferment is likely to be currently or in the near future, and how much sugar has already been converted into alcohol. My recipes mostly call for a SG of about 1.030 before straining the wine into the carboy and topping it with an airlock. If you put it in the carboy or jug too soon, it could fizz up and make a huge mess. In the primary, it makes the bag that I have rubber-banded on top really bulge upwards with fermentation gases within a few minutes or hours after stirring twice a day.

The watermelon had a SG of 1.000, so into the jug it went. The strained fruit mush is in a bowl for the pigs. It filled a one gallon jug and one wine bottle.

The onion wine still had a SG of 1.060! Holy cow, that wine is going to kick like a mule!

The big batch of peach has only had the yeast working on it for four days, and the SG is 1.050, so probably another couple of days.

I feel sad that I won't have any more jugs or carboys to work with after these batches. Hmmm..... Scheming, scheming......

 

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FINALLY the last two batches calmed down enough to strain into the carboys last night.

The onion was finally down to 1.030 so that went into the last one gallon jug. This is the first batch of wine that I've made that actually just filled the size container that the recipe called for. All the others seemed to expand and needed extra bottles with extra airlocks. I'm glad I bought an assortment of drilled stoppers and about a dozen airlocks. I'm down to one old stopper and one new airlock, but it is a type that is used for "less active ferments." Since I am still pretty clueless, I haven't used it yet.

The peach was down to SG 1.025 and filled the second big five gallon carboy, and there was about a gallon left and I have no more gallon jugs...yikes! So I looked at my last three drilled stoppers and searched the house looking for ideas.

I have two big wine bottles that came from someone back when I put the word out for empty bottles, and I think they are about a half gallon each, maybe a little less. I never checked before I soaked the labels off. I had one small stopper that fit. The other stopper was a big one and fit perfectly on the half gallon milk bottle that H23 gifted to me yesterday! Yay! So I only ended up adding about a cup of wine to the bucket of fermented fruit that was strained out of these two batches. We are going to have some happy piggies!

And some happy friends and relatives....

 

[Rebecka]

Wow... you rock! I am really looking forward to hearing about the final gravity on the onion wine. I brew mead. A few years back I had a batch of local honey that just wasn't up to par. My mentor suggested adding onion to bring the sugar content up. I have to admit. If the bottle were not labeled to the catalog , I would not have known there was onion in it at all. I wonder what it would be like distilled ... hmmmm

 

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The onion wine smells NOTHING like onions.....strange! I was thinking "cooking wine, salad dressing vinegar" when I made it, but now....we will see. I bet it will knock your socks off!

It also rose up quite a distance in the two gallon glass primary, unlike most of the other wines I've made thus far. I was really surprised to have it end up being just a hair under a gallon.

I have to decide how much more I should make...if any, right now. I am itching to try more recipes! But it could be getting ridiculous. Hmmm. What constitutes ridiculous? I'll have to think about that for a few days. Can I really have too much if I am primarily gifting it?

Hmm, hmm, hmmmmmm........

Ooops, forgot about the mead recipes and the five gallons of honey still sitting it the pail, waiting to be transferred into carboys....er....canning jars!

 

[Rebecka]

Oh man.. I hope you have meticulous logs! Start a journal. Give every single batch a catalog number. I know it sounds silly now, but I promise come time to drink on these one gallon batches, you will not recall exactly what you did, what the start gravity was and the little sudden bouts of 'hey.. I should really try __ with this one" Did I mention they should be paper logs? Don't lose three years of work for trusting your computer, like some people

I am obligated to add, canning jars do not breathe like a cork. Don't worry if you cannot fill the bottle. With a canning jar you are nearly stopping the aging process.

Ah , the onions. They are fun! They are so sneaky. Pure sugar when fermented.

 

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Rebecka, I completely missed your post! I never subscribed to my own thread! That is good advice. So far, I have the notes rubber-banded right to the jugs. Not the best system, but it will do for now. I keep thinking I need to start a journal.

I have no clue as to what you mean when you talk about canning jars. Can you explain further? Remember, I am a total newbie, and haven't done my usual amount of research. I am working from Wild Fermentation, which just has a couple of chapters on wine and mead, and a little recipe booklet that I am using by just leaving out the additives like Camden tablets, acid, stabilizer....stuff I have no clue about and so I just leave it out completely!

Tonight I did my first solo racking. With the first batch, made with grape juice (I'm drinking some right now, made into an instant sangria with lime and stevia and water) my father racked it when I wasn't home so I was not involved in the process. So I was a bit nervous about it.

I put the first batch of peach wine on my higher counter (I have a strange homemade kitchen, made by a previous homeowner) and put the glass primary, all clean, in the sink so it would be lower than the jugs. I used a piece of flexible tubing and covered the end with my fingers so I could suck on it like a straw to get the syphon going without contaminating it with my germy mouth. I syphoned the wine off the sediment, cleaned the jugs, and syphoned the wine back into them, topping them again with the airlocks. It was somewhere close to the four-week mark, counting from when I originally put it into the jugs with the airlocks.

I cleaned the primary and the syphoning tube, and did the same with that first batch of elderberry wine. Then I marked the calendar so I would know when to do the other batches...another peach, onion, and watermelon. Oh, and not to forget the raspberry!

It was easy and kinda fun! Each batch left me with a little cloudy wine that sat just above the sediment, so I put that in a widemouth pint canning jar with a gauze 4x4 rubberbanded on top, marked them, and put them into my fermenting cupboard. Each of the jars has about 4 ounces that I hope will turn into vinegar. I also checked the grape wine vinegar that I started from the first batch a little more than a month ago, and it still smells like wine, not vinegar! Hmmmm....and my big worry was that without the sulfites, I would be risking making gallons and gallons of vinegar. Wine is not as fragile as I thought. So far, so good!

 

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I got Home Winemaking by Terry Garey from the library this week. I highly recommend this book! It is quite an entertaining read. Hilarious in spots. An excerpt from the glossary:

"Wine enthusiast: A person who will cheerfully converse with almost anyone about wine and/or winemaking with the simple goals of furthering knowledge and having a good time.

Wine snob: A person whose opinions and tastes are invariably superior to anyone else's.

Wombat: A medium-sized marsupial from Australia. Just wanted to see if anyone ever actually reads the glossary besides librarians and editors."


After making several batches, I'm ready to learn how to make wine.

I also stopped by the beer and winemaking store myself today. I went once with dh on a Sunday and they were closed, remodelling, but invited us in. Since then I've sent dh in on his way home from work when I wanted supplies. I really wanted to stop in myself.

The place was mobbed, I was happy to see. All guys, except me and one woman who was sitting on a chair in the back looking glum. I said, "You look excited!" to her and she looked up and laughed, and said she knew she'd be waiting a looooong time, so she was resigned to it. She must've been there with one of the guys.

I got a few more airlocks and the "bungs," which are the drilled corks that the airlocks fit into. I got two for five-gallon carboys in anticipation of getting my new carboys....then found out that I can't get them on Monday. I'll have to practice patience again (fidgets....) I got two each of the two smallest bungs available, to fit into wine bottles for overflow and also because I'd like to see if I can make a fermenting cap for a canning jar using a plastic lid with a hole drilled in it into which I'll put a bung and an airlock. Fancy-schmancy! Cheap, too!

Oh, and I got a nylon bag, too, which is for holding fruit and herbs and spices and such so that I don't have to strain them out painstakingly by pouring five gallons of wine through a tea strainer. I really just wanted to see the material so I could make one, but it was pretty cheap, so I just bought it.

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

psst.. hey baby.. your inbox is full
;-)