A wannabe homesteader makes wine

I've always loved the feeling of being in touch with Mother Nature so maybe it's no surprise that I dream of a life tending towards small scale homesteading. I guess the UK name for a homestead would be a small holding but that always seems to focus more on animals in my mind, whereas I want the simple life all round.

I would love to live somewhere rural with a big farmhouse kitchen, the centre of all activity. There is something deeply attractive about being semi-self sufficient. Not only would I have a much deeper level of gratitude for where everything comes from, but I also like to stick it to the man and not have to pay taxes (VAT) on my efforts. ;)

The start of kitchen renovations years ago. Missy was so little!

For a long time, hubby and I were dreaming of all this in retirement but we've changed our minds a bit. In short, why wait until retirement? We can start some of these things now and get a start on our learning.

By learning new skills and researching them I'm finding a new sense of purpose in life that gives me immense satisfaction. It's also funny to see how things turn out during my, er, shall we call them experiments?

Our latest experiment is around making our own wine.

I think I'll start by making fruit wine.

Hubby usually bulk buys his wine when we go to France each year to keep the costs down but this year we've decided not to go due to Brexit complications and my health being a royal pain in the proverbial. So we have needed to rethink his cheap drinking habits. I do mean *his* drinking as I haven't drunk alcohol in nearly 7 years. No, not even on our wedding day! I found that alcohol was responsible for making my arthritis and fibromyalgia flare. So, in short, not worth it.

My father has made wines and beers on and off over the years but isn't currently making them. He has kindly lent us the equipment and even given us two left over kits that he had. He will, of course, benefit from the fruits of our labour providing they taste more like fruits and less like vinegar! Our start up costs, as a result, were extremely low. All we really needed was some fresh yeast, as it doesn't have a long shelf life, and a few brushes for cleaning the wine bottles that we are reusing and the demi-johns that we've been loaned.

We decided to start with the small kit to get a feel for the process. Also, early spring isn't really the best time for foraging for fruit! Hopefully, we can find some elderflowers in about a month though.

Fermentation scum. Smells good though!

The first step was cleaning and sterilising all the equipment we needed to use. You would think this should be easy but we ended up sterilising the wrong things and had to start over again! I blame the instructions for not being clear enough about what a fermentation container actually was. I assumed it was the demi-john but ours weren't large enough so I had to go back and sterilise the fermentation bucket. The total volume of liquid was about 1 litre more than a demi-john capacity and the thought of having to measure the volume of each sachet added and then split according to the proportions of 1.2 demi-johns was too much for my brain to be bothered with at the time. So I used the larger bucket instead. My pressure release system being a slightly loose lid!

I followed the instructions and set up the bucket of what we hope will become nectar. It's now sitting on my breakfast bar bubbling away for a week. Then I will check the specific gravity to determine if fermentation is complete and proceed with the clearing, filtering and bottling next week.

So far, all I can say for sure is that it smells divine! And has a nice thick scummy layer on top that I presume is normal. Who am I to say? I've never done this before!

Hopefully, next week I will have some good news and hubby (and my Dad) can enjoy a glass, or several, together.

Update: 1/5/19

After about a week the fermentation stopped. The bubbles stopped and I thought the wine was ready for the next stage. Out came the hydrometer to check the specific gravity (SG) in the hope that the wine was ready for clearing and then bottling.

That was the hope, but sadly the SG was way too high indicating that the sugar was still sugar rather than alcohol. I even tasted a bit on a spoon and it was really, really sweet. This wasn't supposed to happen!

Our kit however, is 5 years out of date so I guessed that something had caused the fermentation to get stuck. Hey, it was a free kit after all, so I rolled with it.

I wasn't able to check the acidity as I don't have pH papers. I did know that it was too sweet, from the taste test, so there wasn't enough alcohol to kill the yeast. The yeast was new and had been active. I did wonder if I had been a bit heavy handed with the Campden tablets and accidentally killed the yeast but further reading explained that it kills bacteria and *wild* yeasts. So that was unlikely at the doses used.

The only thing I could think of was to add more yeast nutrient and hope to kick start the yeast again. I added another teaspoon of the new yeast nutrient and gave everything a good stir.

After 24 hours, the fermentation restarted and the bucket was bubbling away again. I guess the age of the kit was an issue. Or the temperature in my kitchen wasn't right or consistent enough. I can't carry that heavy bucket upstairs to the airing cupboard though so it stayed in the kitchen where I can keep an eye on it.

I checked the bucket 2 days later and was nearly bowled over with the smell of alcohol when I opened the lid. Wow! I was feeling drunk from the fumes! Time to check the SG again.

Home brew

This time around the SG had dropped well below 1.000 that I was aiming for and was 0.900 indicating a very, very dry wine. At this point I added the stabiliser and started the clearing process. It didn't look very appetising at the time. I think I likened it to a watered down sewage sample! Yummy!

Amazingly, by the next day the finings had done their work and the wine had cleared and looked like... wine! Yay! I didn't really want to offer anyone a glass of raw sewage. Even I have my standards!

All the dead yeast and scummy bits had sedimented to the bottom of the bucket. I was ready for it this time and the siphon and tubing were all sterilised ready with the bottles and corks. On occasion I can be organised.

Hubby helped me to siphon the wine into a clean bucket from which he sampled my wares for the taste test. I don't like dry wine but as I don't drink it was down to Hubby to decide if it needed sweetening before bottling. He has happy with it. Very happy, in fact. I was also pleased as it meant I could skip the sweetening stage and move right onto bottling.

Our mini-production line for all of 6 bottles was set up. I filled the bottles and Hubby forced the corks in. Tip: soak the corks overnight before hand and they go in easier. ;-)

There was about a pint more wine than we had sterile bottles for left in a jug. Rather than waste it Hubby decided to drink it there and then. Well, over the next hour or so. He didn't neck it back like a drunk.

Before he fell asleep

This is when we discovered that it was very alcoholic for a wine. Hubby is a big guy at 6 foot 5 inches and was reduced to a giggling school girl rather quickly. He was asleep by 8pm!

I didn't have a starting SG reading so I couldn't accurately work out the alcohol level. I estimated the starting SG as an average for a starting point for wine. Then working out the difference between the supposed starting SG and the final SG, and using a fudge factor we got from our wine making book, we estimated the alcohol to be 24% v/v. That seemed rather high to us and if Hubby had to guess he would say it was somewhere between 16 and 18%. It was potent, but not that potent.

Either way, I had a very happy unconscious Hubby who now thinks I'm a great wife as I can make cheap plonk. I'll take that. :-)

We did give my father a bottle as thankfully it tastes like wine, not vinegar. It was touch and go whether I could get it to work but I feel that I succeeded on this occasion. I even have another batch set up but this time from tinned fruit and not using an out of date kit!