I usually always keep a bottle of wine in the refrigerator, but I actually ran out last night. That's pretty strange for me, considering that I have 14 gallons of home made wine in the basement. I had to go down to the basement and look to see what I wanted to bring up to fill a regular wine bottle with. I don't want to keep a gallon jug in the refrigerator, it takes up too much room.
I had bought a dozen 750 ml bottles and reusable screw on caps a few years ago. I've given a few of them away but I still have enough to take care of my needs. I usually only keep 1 or 2 bottles of wine in the fridge at a time, but that limits my choice of what to drink. I decided to fill 3 of the wine bottles from different gallon jugs so that I have a bit of choice. I decided on 3 different wines to bring up to the kitchen to fill the bottles. The jug on the left is strawberry/rhubarb wine that I made in July of 2017, the middle jug is raspberry from August of 2014, and the jug on the right is rhubarb wine from June of 2015.
I had to taste test them before deciding on what to bring up, in case I didn't want to drink it. Some of the wine in the basement has not aged enough for my taste. The rhubarb wine usually only takes a couple years of aging before it's ready to drink. It gets a bit less tart over time. I could leave the strawberry/rhubarb wine to age longer, but it's been a year and a half and it tastes pretty good already. The wine that surprised me was the 2014 raspberry wine. I didn't think that would ever be drinkable. Up to now, it's just had an off taste, probably due to the fact that I sulfited it to kill the yeast when it was more or less done fermenting. Almost all store bought wines have sulfites in them to kill the yeast so that it won't continue to slowly ferment and possibly blow the top off the bottle due to pressure.
The raspberry seems to have finally mellowed out enough to mostly get rid of that off flavor after 4 years of aging. It seems to be a semi-sweet wine now. I normally make sweet wines now, I keep feeding the yeast until it dies from the alcohol content, and that leaves it on the sweet side. I haven't sulfited any of my wines since the raspberry wine.
Here's the wine bottles, filled and ready to go in the refrigerator. The gallon jugs go back into storage in the basement until I need to fill the bottles again.
Here's what happens when you ferment two 5 gallon pails of rhubarb. I had just taken the towels off the tops of the buckets to stir them. This is from 2017.
These are half way through the primary ferment. I had just stirred them. The foam is from all the CO2 that is a byproduct of the fermenting process.
And here's what I ended up with. These are in the basement ageing, along with all the other gallon jugs.
I still have one gallon jug of wild grape wine from 2011. That's the first wine that I made. The wild grape wine takes a long time to age and mellow, and it's still a bit tannic and astringent. Seriously dry wine.
All the rest of the wine that I have is from 2014 or newer. I don't know if I'll make any wine this year or not, but I said that last year and still ended up making a batch of plum wine from over-ripe yellow plums that I bought at the local farmer's market. I get over-ripe plums because they're easier to make the slush from for fermenting. If they're too solid, they're too hard to get the pits out of and to mash.
Anyway, now that I've rambled on with this post, I think I'll end it here. I hope you found it interesting!
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