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After bottling our 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon earlier this month, my youngest son Kevin, asked what other wines did we have in the making. When I told him none he was reflective and said that this was the first time since 2008 that we didn’t have something aging. Well, we couldn’t let that last for long.
As of this writing we do not have any juices fermenting. It isn’t for lack of trying though. Our power is out for the second day. This has delayed the making of a Sauvignon Blanc from a kit, peach wine from scratch and a raspberry melomel from scratch. Actually since I have only two fermentation bins one of those will have to wait and it won’t be the peaches. The peach wine is Kathy’s wine. We hunted for directions on the Internet and settled on one. The melomel can be made at any time. The raspberries were frozen, at least they were two days ago. If we don’t get our power on soon, the melomel may be made immediately. Although there are no wines fermenting at this moment, by the holidays there should be three aging … if we get our power back on.
Cheers,
Terry
I finished construction of my new wine room two weeks ago. Just a few pieces of trim are still needed to completely finish. I remember going way overboard when installing the wine racks. I shook them vigorously to see if I could move them. If I could, additional screws were used to anchor them to the wall and each other. I didn’t want to take any chances of wine bottles tumbling to breakage.
Little did I realize that the first test of my resolve would come on August 23rd, our 39th anniversary, with a rare East Coast earthquake. What made this quake different than previous ones decades ago was that the house shook for a longer time. It seemed like deer jumped onto the roof of the house and were running around. Eventually I made it outside to inspect for damage and there was none. Then it was the wine room that came to my attention. Nothing was out of place. Not the wine bottles, pictures or other wine-related regalia. Actually only a couple things fell in the house but nothing in the wine room. When it comes to bottle aging your wine, build racks to last for a long time and even rare earthquakes.
Cheers,
Terry
 It took longer to drive to Vint Hill Craft Winery than bottle our barrel of 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon. DJ, Vint Hill’s winemaker, had the bottling machine steam cleaned and cooled by the time we arrived. Our wine was racked into a stainless steel tank that was connected to the bottling machine. The first task was to flush out any water that may have condensed in the line. DJ ran some wine through each of the bottle spigots into a bucket. He then returned the wine to the stainless steel tank. This wine had a little water mixed in with it. Returning it to the wine in the tank would not affect the wine. If we didn’t do this, the lingering water that was in the bottling line after the cleaning may have affected the first bottle.
Meghan and Kevin helped us with the bottling process. Meghan placed empty bottles on the track, Kathy placed a capsule on the bottles as they passed her, I loaded the filled bottles into a case while Kevin took pictures. I was filling cases as the same rate that Meghan was emptying cases. It took less than an hour to completely fill a barrel of wine. There was one drawback though. The label machine was broken so our bottles do not have the label on them. That will have to be done by hand once we receive the labels. That will be a good task while watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Luckily we took two cars to Vint Hill because we needed to put cases in both of them.
I have bottled wine at home using suction and gravity. There was a small bottle filler at Tin Lizzie Wineworks. But a bottling line at a winery is simply hands down the best way to bottle.
DJ told us that bottle shock was only a short time. The aromas will return after a couple days. I was formally under the impression that bottle shock would last for weeks. We did try our wine after the last bottle was only half full. I am looking forward to watching the wine evolve as it now bottle ages.
Cheers,
Terry
We’re just hours away from bottling our 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon we crafted at Vint Hill Craft Winery in Virginia. This day feels like a graduation, however, it is just one more step in the process of making wine. Although the wine has aged in a French oak barrel, Ana Sélection for almost 21 months, the wine will continue to age and change over the years. I am just putting the finishing touches to a wine room that will age the wine as well as the other wines Kathy and I have made.
So even though this is just another step in the process of wine making, there seems to be finality to it. We have traveled the 70 miles to Vint Hill Craft Winery for the past three years. From our first meeting with the winemaking staff where we tasted different Cabs and discussed what we wanted to achieve, to sorting table work, fermentation, racking to barrel, adding tartaric acid and Laffort products and tastings from the barrel, bottling seems like a conclusion.
Fortunately, we have other wines that we have made and bottled since the Cab at Vint Hill. So there won’t be a rush to drink a barrel over the next year. We can leave the wine take its time and perhaps drink a little each year and see how it continues to evolve. When we first started making wine, there was a tendency to drink it after bottling it, provided we liked it. No we have the luxury of time. Last month I bottled a 2010 Petite Sirah and Kathy bottled a 2010 Muscat. Both were made at home with juice from Lodi. We just opened a bottle of Muscat last night a month after bottling. We haven’t touched the Petite Sirah yet, however there is a Petite Sirah sorbet recipe that I’d like to make today so we may be opening a bottle.
So even though the cases of Cab can rest and age in a new environment, as it changes over time, today still seem like graduation.
Cheers,
Terry
Several years ago I built a wine cellar. Walls were paneled, Ikea wine racks were assembled and old wine corks were cut into quarter round and half round to use as molding. The capacity of the small area was seven cases. It served well until now.
For the past two years we were making a barrel of Cabernet Sauvignon at Vint Hill Craft Winery in Virginia. We plan on bottling this weekend after aging the Cab in French oak for 20+ months. Needless to say our 24 – 25 cases will not fit in the present space. So off to the drawing board, we reclaimed a room in the house that had accidently turned into a junk room.
It was decided to turn the room into a wine room. Three walls were painted and the combination of the walls and the Ikea wine racks closely match the colors on the WineTrailTraveler website. One wall has the wine racks that will hold over 300 bottles. The Ikea wine racks were easy to assemble and attaching them to wall made them quite secure. I plan on adding a couple of photos printed on canvas of wine regions to the wine rack wall.
On another wall, an old secretary stands filled with wine books. We have two old ½ gallon wine bottles to add to the regalia in the room that include a Jamestown Glass Blowers Colonial wine bottle, an earthenware jug and a sunken wine bottle. I also have a newspaper article to back and frame of my uncle Orville (Hun) and his winemaking operation in Carroltown, Pennsylvania.
A small table in the room will offer a space for wine tasting and drinking. The room will serve as an escape and attractive atmosphere for wine drinking friends and family.
Reclaiming and turning the room into a wine room was an enjoyable two-week job. The cost was less than purchasing a wine rack system. It will offer years of use, unless we decide to start producing more barrels of wine wine.
Cheers,
Terry
I took a chance and carted off a few bottles of my Illuminatus Two Coasts to the Wine Bloggers Conference #WBC11 held in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend. I knew that I liked the wine, but would it stand up to wine writers? Several writers tasted the wine including Richard Leahy (Richard Leahy’s Wine Report), Dave McIntyre (Dave McIntyre’s Wineline), Russ Kane (Vintage Texas), Jennifer Breaux Blosser (Breaux Vineyards), Elle Potter (Zephyr Adventures) and several other writers and sommeliers.
Illuminatus Two Coasts was a small batch (three cases) cellared, oaked and bottled at home. It was a desire to blend two varietal grapes that I enjoy. The blend is 80% Lake County, California Cabernet Sauvignon and 20% Virginia Tannat. Those proportions were decided on a year ago when family members gave input on different percentages of each variety.
Several words were used, however, no one said the wine was plonk or the dreaded “interesting.” Actually the verbal statements were very positive. What can I take from this? First, wine writers can make wine. The second is that the wine made can hold its own with other writers. Wine writers should consider making wine. It can become very enlightening.
Cheers,
Terry
Chris Pearmund of Pearmund Cellars in Virginia has a photo album of photos sent by people with a bottle of his wines. Photos are from all around the world. So I decided to start to take photos of my Illuminatus wines. The Cabernet/Merlot 2009 was seen next to Hawkes Bay in New Zealand last November. Last week a bottle of the Illuminatus Cabernet/Merlot was seen in Prince Edward County, Ontario overlooking the blue waters of Lake Ontario. The name Illuminutus was chosen because making wine was very enlightening for Kathy and me.
Cheers,
Terry
I knew my mistake after bottling the wine. Actually I knew it before bottling and just ignored it. Kathy and I bottled her 2010 Muscat. The wine was fermented dry and last weekend she added potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulphite. This weekend we backed sweetened the Muscat wine with Muscat concentrate. Our error, we didn’t filter the wine.
The wine was fairly clear until we added the Muscat concentrate to sweeten it. It then became cloudy. Not real cloudy but enough to take away the clearness and replace it with a haze. Since we do not have filtering equipment, we skipped that step. I need to buy a small filtering kit.
This is the first time we’ve back sweetened a wine with concentrate. First we took out a liter of the wine and added 50 ml of concentrate. We then increase the total concentrate to 100 ml. That seemed a bit too sweet so we took the specific gravity reading. Our reading came to 1025 that put the wine into the sweet range. We decided to go with less than the 100 ml of concentrate to a liter rate but a bit more than the 50 ml rate. We added one liter of concentrate to the 18 liters of wine. The specific gravity reading was at 1015 that puts the wine into the medium sweet category.
A number of winemakers have told use to decrease the sugar when sweetening a wine to below what you like. Their rationale is one can always add sugar when drinking the wine (Kathy has threatened to do this but never has) but you can’t take away the sugar when drinking the wine. We are satisfied with the medium sweetness.
I’m not OK with the haze though. So I need to find an inexpensive filter, one that would be perfect for small five to ten gallon batches of wine. Do you have any suggestions?
Cheers,
Terry
Our first wine was made from a Cabernet Sauvignon wine kit that Kathy gave me for Christmas 2007. The kit sat, unopened for several months while I gathered the courage to open it and make wine. Thinking back I spent hours reading and rereading the directions. It also took hours to try to read a hydrometer. Now it only takes seconds and if I make a dry red wine from a kit, I wouldn’t bother reading or following the directions.
For the longest time I thought the wine was plonk. I picked up the unforgiveable geranium smell that I disliked. For the next couple years the wine was relegated for use as a mulled wine during the holidays. Add enough brandy, spices and orange slices and the wine actually tasted good. With only four bottles left I decided to try one during the summer. The wine has been in a bottle for three years now. It was a dark red color without any garnet hues. That’s a good sign. It has a bit of a wine-kit aroma and taste but that isn’t as prominent as it was after bottling and for the first couple years. The light body goes well with our current hot weather. In all the wine is more palatable now than it was in the past.
Although many wine kit wines are designed to drink at an early age, they can improve with age. I don’t believe that I’ll return to kit wines again. I’d rather make wines from fruit or juice if I can’t get the fruit.
Cheers,
Terry
I began fermenting the Petite Sirah on October 1st 2010 from a six-gallon container of juice sourced from Lodi, California. At only 19 brix, I did add two and a half pounds of sugar to raise the brix level to 22.5. Fermentation was completed in a couple of weeks. The wine was racked and placed in a dark room. In December malolactic fermentation began and since the room was on the cool side during the winter, the malo lasted until February. I then oaked the wine using a light French oak spiral.
Since our son, Kevin, was visiting this weekend, I decide to bottle the wine. An extra pair of hands is always welcome. Kevin recalled trying to cork the wine from our first attempt to make wine in 2008. Kathy had bought a wine kit for Christmas. Kevin and Brittany attempted to cork the bottles with a hand-held corker that required two hands to hold the bottle, two hands to hold the corker, and one hand to pull the lever. This time though, Kevin used another Christmas present, a corking apparatus that only required one hand. Advancement!
So now the Petite Sirah can get over its bottle shock and continue to age in the bottle. Luckily we still have a couple bottles from our first attempt as well as bottles we bottled a year ago at Tin Lizzie Wineworks and at home. So I can forget about the Petite Sirah for now and concentrate on the others. We did end up with slightly more than 30 bottles and had the remainder with last evening’s meal. The Petite Sirah had a red color and was light bodied offering dark fruit on the aroma and taste. The light bodied wine may best be suited for chilling and serving during the blistering hot summer. It will make a nice light everyday table wine.
Cheers,
Terry
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Wine Room Survives Rare East Coast Earthquake
I finished construction of my new wine room two weeks ago. Just a few pieces of trim are still needed to completely finish. I remember going way overboard when installing the wine racks. I shook them vigorously to see if I could move them. If I could, additional screws were used to anchor them to the wall and each other. I didn’t want to take any chances of wine bottles tumbling to breakage.
Little did I realize that the first test of my resolve would come on August 23rd, our 39th anniversary, with a rare East Coast earthquake. What made this quake different than previous ones decades ago was that the house shook for a longer time. It seemed like deer jumped onto the roof of the house and were running around. Eventually I made it outside to inspect for damage and there was none. Then it was the wine room that came to my attention. Nothing was out of place. Not the wine bottles, pictures or other wine-related regalia. Actually only a couple things fell in the house but nothing in the wine room. When it comes to bottle aging your wine, build racks to last for a long time and even rare earthquakes.
Cheers,
Terry