Wine

Started the Cherry wine. It’s an interesting process:

First, I washed, pitted, and crushed about 10lbs of sweet cherries in a polyethylene pail. redmed did sporadic quality checking and verified that the cherries were of suitable quality.

I added about a quart of water and a crushed, dissolved Campden (Potassium Metabisulphite) tablet. This was to kill off whatever local yeast, mold, and other critters were growing on the cherries. Yes, organic / hippie me adds sulfites to his wine. You know what? The other options are activating the pectin by boiling the fruit (leading to a very cloudy wine), or growing wild mold in my primary fermenter. I’ll take my chances.

After a couple of hours, I boiled 3 pints of water and a pound of sugar. Once that had cooled, I added it to the mix, and sprinkled a packet of Montrachet yeast over the top.

Then, I put the lid on the bucket, primed an airlock with vodka (gotta use vodka for wine. The old guys said so, and I believe them) and popped it it. Within a couple of hours it was bubbling madly. Go yeast!

Today we removed the lid and gave it a stir with a sterilized spoon. To my great shock, it smells like wine! Perhaps this isn’t as hard as it looks. The plan is to stir it once a day for seven days.

After that comes the fun part: We have to strain out the pulp. Yup, I’m going to try to transfer the juice of 10 pounds of cherries through cheesecloth, leaving the pulp behind. I plan to wear clothing that I won’t mind getting ruined for that step.

Assuming that there’s anything left after the filtering, I add another pound of sugar in another 3 pints of water. This, combined with the oxygen that’ll get dissolved from the filtering, ought to re-invigorate the fermentation and kick us up to the 12 – 14% alcohol range.

Finally (after another couple of weeks) comes the really fun part. We get to make another batch of syrup and add it “to taste.” We keep tuning that until fermentation ceases and the wine is sweet enough. Then we bottle and leave it the heck alone for about 3 months.