Total Pageviews

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Bottling wine

Newly bottled pear wine ready for corking


We made a batch of wine about 5 or 6 weeks ago and put the juice, yeast, etc into two 5 gallon carboys (big glass jugs). We put the carboys in the pantry to ferment and about 10 days ago went to Dayton to buy a wine corker because our friend Jules (who helped us process the pears in November) could not find hers for us to borrow. We found a wine corker at a beer/wine store in Belmont (an urban suburb of Dayton). We also found they had beer brewing supplies so Eugene bought several kinds of malts. We will be making beer in the next couple of days. We have not brewed beer since we moved here-it's been well over a year. Too long.

About a week ago we put the carboys on the kitchen table where they suddenly started bubbling again. You cannot bottle actively fermenting wine so we waited and waited for it to calm down. Daily we would discuss whether or not we could bottle the stuff and daily we decided it was too active.

Today, though, the wine seemed quiet enough to rack up. So after lunch we got 13 bottles cleaned up and corks sterilized and decanted one carboy into 13 bottles. We didn't have enough bottles to rack up the other carboy. we made a lot of wine!

Me tasting the new wine. It is a sweet wine with a good pear flavor.
As it ages it should get a lot drier.
Cheers!

The plan is to go to a Superbowl party tomorrow and hope the wine drinkers there kill enough bottles so we can finish this job on Monday.

A note on the Superbowl-I have no prediction on who will win. I would not pay attention to this commercial fest at all if there was not a social occasion to attend with lots of good food, drink and friends to nosh with


3 comments:

Dancingfarmer said...

Watch that bubbling!
My husband had an overly "carbonated" strawberry beer made by a friend BLOW up his nose. Quite funny---though we cleaned it up for a while after wards since it blew every where else too---walls, floors, windows etc (and I am sure it wasn't pleasant getting it in the nose either!)
Your wine sounds delicious though! Pears are one of my favorite fruits to turn into other products.

Chandira said...

Yeah, that's about where I am with the Superbowl too.

I remember my gran making elderberry champagne that wouyld burst occasinonally covering her pantry with sweet sticky stuff and glass. That stuff was potent! And very good.

Anonymous said...

I’ve also made a pear wine of our own produce. And all I can say is that is not so hard to do. It’s pretty simple, actually. Anyway, what’s really difficult to deal with is the fermentation period. It requires good discipline and patience to be able to make a fine-tasting wine. As far as I can remember, it took me several months before I decided to bottle it. And well, after the long wait, I think it’s worth it because my friends enjoyed drinking it.

Rob Feckler