BLUEBERRY.BOUND

A week ago I added Sparkolloid Powder to my blueberry wine must. This blend of crab-friendly clay and polysaccharides sunk the floating yeasts and blueberry bits by positively charging them. Now three inches of detritus and less than a gallon of clear blueberry goodness remain.

Time to rack the good from the ugly. The somewhat drinkable from the undrinkable...and purple...

Not bad. But another racking is on order.The temperature breaks record this week. Granted it was only 95F, but in the North East that matters. Wine with loitering yeasts could restart fermentation or simply spoil.

The vast universe of tank air-space also worries me. Every day I spray Private Preserve to protect the wine from oxidizing. But I have no clue how long that blanket of inert gasses will hold.

Impatient, I set up to bottle.

Last time, I filled twenty six bottles. Six months on, I still have twenty. It is not every day you want to guzzle pink colored, banana-strawberry flavored welches with alcohol.

This time I scrounge about for half bottles. A gallon will fill ten 375ml bottles. Hopefully, I can also get rid of some wine as gifts. I mean, gift away my hand-harvested blueberry gold to a deserving few.

Once everything is sterile (including myself), I try racking the wine into bottles alone. I fail. So, I grab my spouse from dinner preparation.

I will pump. She will take on the tube's end, which, annoyingly, will not fill unless pressed at the right angle, under pressure, into the bottle. The siphon trigger cannot work unless against a flat surface, and most bottle punts (bottoms) curve.

So, with wife hating me, we begin.

The must remains hazy. This is annoying. I should have racked again. Maybe filtered. Most Americans view hazy wine as faulty. No one really wants to decant and let the sediment settle for a half hour or more. Conditioned by fast food, year-round strawberries, and driving to our mail box, we want immediate satisfaction. Allowing a wine to rest postpones enjoyment, unbearably for some.

But I have to stay true to the fruit. In bottle, a bit of lees (skins) will continue to contribute to the evolution of the wine's character. Filtering would remove that.

With three regular bottles (750ml) and three splits (375ml) brimming with blueberry, we taste what wine is left.

The color is of mild intensity, ruby with a slight haziness. The nose has light intensity of tart cherry, apple, clay and some sulfur. On the palate it is dry, with medium to high acidity, light tannin, light body, short length. Flavors of green and red apple (malic acid), wild strawberry, kiwi and a touch of sulfur slide by the palate in one note.

Decent and drinkable. I should have extracted more color and flavor by not bagging the skins and instead punching them down during fermentation. More time on the lees after fermentation would have also added more complexity. I also should have avoided the temptation to chaptalize (adding sugar to up the alcohol). Stupid internet advice.

Most fruit wines lack acidity and have little shelf life. Thus the blueberry acidity will help the wine age. The hint of sulfur lingers from using too many campden tablets for so little must. My frantic fear of spoilage will help preserve the wine in the long run.

It seems odd that my wine does not taste like blueberries. However, most wines do not taste like grapes. They taste of the process: the added acidities, oak, yeast strains, microxygenation machines, and chemical tweaking. I realize that blueberry "flavored" wines and beers that I have had use blueberry concentrates, distillates, or worse, chemical blends like ethyl safranate, butyl-2-butenoate, and ethyl-3-hydroxybutyrate. Yum!

Regardless, my bottles need corks. Time to give them one last inert gas spray and cork them.

With the bottles corked, I rest them sideways to ensure the corks get properly moist. Otherwise, air could get in or wine could leak.

A week later I cap the bottles with remaining foils from my kit. No nibbling mice or bunnies will eat my corks...this time. Some sediment survived the racking, but we could all use a little more patience. Decanting or just pouring slowly would suffice.In the end, going from fruit to ferment to fining to finishing was plain scary. So much more could go wrong compared to kit wine. This was not a sterilized bag-o-juice, chemically balanced to perfection and paired with packets for each step.

With more involvement and knowledge about your source materials, the harder it becomes. Picking the berries by hand forced me to worry about every detail. I had to choose between different berries, yeast strains, cleansers and fining agents. I took it personally when fermentation would not start. I rinsed equipment religiously, until the rotten-egg reek of sulfur went away. I sulked around the house for days concerned about adding sugar, water or acids. Every choice seemed wrong.

Yet every thing worked out.

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1.03.01

REROLLED.BOIL

Daybreak and I find fermentation following forward. With nighttime temperatures under fifty (in August?), the humidifier has kept the tank a happy seventy two. However, I need to ensure the yeasts ferment completely.
Once the bubbling (and my coffee) are finished, I sample the must.

Thus far, the yeasts have neared the same specific gravity as water: 1.000. But to finish the job, they need oxygen and redistribution throughout the must. No air or nutrients means dead yeasts. Also the bubbling CO2 they produce will not go away without degassing the must. So I re-sterilize the secondary carboy, let dry and then siphon.

Even thinking about the bag of skins turns my stomach. Any extraction that could have happened via fermentation is probably over. Also, the carboy's neck is two inches in diameter. The bag is six. So I trash the skins.

Along the way, we taste the must. Surprisingly, it is not poison. It seems almost palatable even fruity, and the sweetness is nearly gone. One niggle though: it is thin. The body and tannin are there enough, but the alcohol is lacking. Without a chemist lab I cannot check the proof. But it tastes under 10% of alcohol by volume.

Time to cheat.

What went into the morning coffee gets dissolved into a test tube with some must and nutrient. Hopefully, the yeasts are still kicking around. Rebooting fermentation with cane sugar will give me more alcohol than before. Where it takes the flavor is unknown.

The next day finds resurrected yeasts churning away at the sugar. If any bacteria join in, we are done for. Yet everything smells clean enough.

Only time will tell.

DEGUNKING.SHAWANGUNK

"Get Gunked" is screen-printed on the Organic Baby Bodysuit ($24.99), the "Classic" Thong ($10.39) and everything from Mugs to the Dog T-Shirt ($22.99). Luckily, nothing actually related to wine bears the Shawangunk Wine Trail's attempt at shoot its fleeting reputation in the foot. Would you even know how to gunk yourself if your glass had that printed on it?

Wine tasting should be fun, but advertising that your region's merits boil down to not just getting drunk, but something more akin to getting junked, funked, or worse, punk'd relegates your wine to shower grime or is-your-refrigerator-running prank calls.

New York wine has struggled for decades to gain a laudable international reputation, yet it still serves wine as if it were cheap beer or vodka shots. Tourists will go wine tasting anyway. Why not treat them like adults? Teach them to enjoy exploring wine for more than its alcoholic effects. Drinking can tell them so much about a place, from a year's weather and geography, to the people and their traditions.

Beneath the Get Gunked website campaign are paragraphs promising that "The eleven wineries on the Trail all follow the tradition of the fine winemaking established by the early French Huguenot settlers who brought their wine making expertise to this valley over 300 years ago." Sound legitimate-ish right? With descriptors like "well crafted", "beautifully made", "majestic Hudson River", "memorable experience", "prize winning" and only a two hour drive, I thought, why not drag the wife down?

With the Hudson Valley's identity crisis in mind, let's go wine tasting!

ROTA.FORTUNAE

Like fate's turning wheel, my burgeoning Barbaresco cycles to and fro between the glass carboy and fermenting tank, uncertain of its future. For the last week, the Chitosan bonded with the Kieselsol pulling the proteins, dead yeasts and excess junk to the carboy's bottom. Inches of debris now colored the base purple. So I racked the wine, hoping to not need filter pads.
Many winemakers take pride in avoiding filtration. They believe that it thins wine and removes complex flavors that could develop if left to age in bottle. That, and my wine already seemed thinner than any Barbarescos that had ever passed my palate.Racking the wine too many times, however, does risk ruining the end product. If you splash it too much or let oxygen froth into the tube, you get vinegar. So I did my best to be gentle. The grime left at the bottom = success.
The next day, I racked it again.
Although Barbaresco has pedigree, it bears little relation to the wines it claims from antiquity. Not only has the process modernized into a chemist's wet dream, the end products could not be further apart. The wine of antiquity saw massive extraction and addition of spices, honey, fruit and other inebriates like opium. Much was boiled down in lead tanks to increase the sweetness and weight. This sugary, alcoholic monster (akin to Madeira, PX Sherry or Port), was often diluted with water (unless you were a barbarian).No more digressing. Me knocking Barbaresco or antiquity won't make my Canadian Welches taste any better. All I know is that this racking makes me sleepy. Kneeling nearly prostrate before my bucket-o-wine altar I realized, at the heart of crafting wine lies patience, attention and mostly luck.Luckily, the only slough left this time fit into one glass.
I had to taste it. What if the nightly gassing with CO2, Argon and Nitrogen didn't keep oxidation away? What if all the shellfish glue, preservatives, dead yeasts and kitty litter killed the fruity, grape-y decentness that came maybe from Italy, maybe Canada? What if the apartment was too cold or too hot? The bouquet told me that I hadn't screwed up. No mustiness or yeast, just red fruit and floral notes. The appearance lacked haze. Going down everything seemed fine, if a bit bland. Light notes of dried red cherry, cranberry and pepper dust came and went. Alcohol and acidity presented themselves but only to flank the slim-bodied fruit.

Who knows? Maybe re-racking and bottling won't kill it.

FERMENTATION PERSUASION

Yeast added. Lid shut. Airlock, well, locked. I wait. Austen's Anne Elliot knows how I feel: suffering quietly alone, waiting upon your sugars to become alcohol takes the patience of a truly goodwilled and kind nature. Yeasts, like most gentlemen, are at best conversely inattentive and then later overambitious in character. They must be treated with the ever lightest of attentions, even if one's bloom has vanished early with a rapid increase of the crow's foot about the eye, one might still indulge in the hope of exciting their esteem, thus someday garnering a place amidst their large fortune and...DAY 2: I wake and find the temperature up two degrees. Cracking the lid unveils a foam of Carbon Dioxide from the yeast on the surface. The hydrometer shows the sugars are down 0.004. So I begin the daily stir, giving the yeasts air to breathe. The foam separates and swirls like Jupiter's surface.

Two more days find the yeast cruising through the grape sugars, with the hydrometer bobbing its approval at 1.032 Brix. The apartment smells brilliantly.

The wife takes a turn letting the yeasts breathe.

Once lidded, the airlock pops and bubbles the CO2 safely out of the tank, not letting anything else in. Too much oxygen contact and the wine turns to vinegar or worse breeds invading bacteria.Day 4: A churning thick cap of burping yeasts has formed and Mr. Hydrometer tells me the end is near: 1.020 S.G. I give the wine a heavy last stir and take time to upload more photos.

The fifth day wakes me to a quiet airlock. A layer of lazy froth gets stirred away and the hydrometer dips to 0.999. Secondary Fermentation show time!

FOMENTING FERMENTATION

After a week of work and wait, I prepared for the first fermentation. Step 1: clean like crazy. After a heavy wash of all the equipment, I mixed water and sulphite powder. After fearfully reading and rereading the packet, I stuffed my nose and covered my eyes. Gloves would have been nice, but lacking a biohazard suit I cleaned carefully.
After a fervent rinsing/not bursting into flames, I left the equipment out to dry. Impatient, I poured over the instructions. The translation from Quebecios French was shaky but I had bigger worries.
The linger of sulfur sent me back to the bathtub.With equipment drying again, I lined up the usual chemical suspects.
First to go in, Bentonite, the clay of kitty litter fame.The single page of instructions wouldn't assure me why I wanted cat-tasting wine, so wikipedia came in handy. Supposedly, Bentonite has cleaning and bonding qualities perfect for drawing out unwanted proteins and haziness. However, my instructions asked for "2 litres of warm water". That's a lot of water for 23 litres of wine. So I checked the French, and behold, "500 ml (2 tasses) d'eau tiède".
Once the litter was stirred to near-lumplessness, I grabbed my bag o must and dumped it in. Welches and berry scents wafted into the air but luckily not onto the carpet.
Next came the hydrometer to test the specific gravity/sugar content/brix of the must. Packlab did their job, balancing mother nature to a near perfect 1.080. This is a big deal because the sugar in grapes will become alcohol. Not enough sugar means hungry yeast. Hungry yeast means no alcohol. Which means no wine, just yeasty, kitty-litter-y grape juice.
Next up: bread-making.
Adding yeast is cheating and sacrosanct to some winemakers, who believe in letting the naturally occurring yeasts in the grape skins to turn the sugars into alcohol. Yet most add Mr. Pasteur's genius stroke without blinking (and occasionally forget to filter them later).
So I added yeast to warm water (from, well, my coffee maker). While waiting for them to wake, Alton Brown will catch you up on these guys. My dehydrated yeast fungi zombies from Champagne should thus be resurrected with a little wet warmth. They may not absolve my sins, but once reborn will turn sweet into heat.So I set the timer and went back to staring at the yeast. Nothing. Maybe now? No. Ten minutes later? Nope. But then...thanks entirely to my mind meld...

IT'S ALIVE!!! The air became heady and bready. After stirring it vigorously into the grape must, I clamped the airtight lid onto the food safe trash can, accidentally jammed the grommet into the juice with the airlock and then proceeded to ignore the problem by tasting the leftover juice:

Appearance: clear, ruby, medium intense color
Nose: clean condition, medium intense aroma, grape juice and red apple notes
Palate: high sweetness, low acidity, light body, light tannin, forward blueberry preserves, blackberries, medium length, quality...um juice?

Now the five day wait begins!