Joy of Home Wine Making by Terry A. Garey Read Free Book Online Page A

equipment, ingredients, and procedures before moving on to the actual recipes. To ensure consistent results, you need to understand more about what you are doing, what is happening, and what it is happening with. An hour or two of your time now will pay off in good results later.
    These recipes are fairly simple; most require only one kind of fruit so that you will become familiar with the basic process of fermenting on the fruit. Besides, you need to learn the characteristics of each of the fruits and vegetables when they are translated into wine.
    For example, strawberry wine sounds very romantic. It’s the stuff of old folk songs and legends: lips like strawberry wine, etc. In your mind you probably have an imaginary taste for it already.
    Believe me, your fantasy is going to differ from the actual wine, which will be drier, lusher, more acidic, or aromatic than you thought. This is not bad. In fact, it’s quite good. But it isn’t what you would think. It doesn’t even look the way people think it should, usually being more straw color than berry.
    Take carrot wine, for instance. I had no idea what to expect the first time I made it. I did it because it was winter, carrots were cheap, and I wanted to experiment. So I combed through the old recipes, and made some. Six months later, when I bottled the stuff, I was not pleased. It didn’t taste like much. Certainly not like carrots. Six months later, same results.
    My brother, the Ph.D., was visiting and insisted on taking a bottle back home with him. Over a year later, I was visiting him. He remembered the carrot wine and brought it up from the basement. “What’s up, Doc?” I cried, “I’ve tried it, and it’s not very good. Just throw it out.”
    We tried it anyway; it was wonderful. That’s how I learned that vegetable wines take longer to age. But once again, it tasted nothing like carrots!
    Before you get into both blending and the more advanced recipes, you must learn the basic flavor notes of the single fruit and vegetable and herb wines. This takes a few years, but so what? Time is on your side. So is experimentation. You can skip back and forth between this section and the next if you like, but it’s best to make several wines from the middle section first.
    Over the years I’ve come up with some wonderful surprises and some dismal failures. Watermelon was a wonderful surprise. Tangerine and brown sugar was a dismal failure.
    Tastes differ. Someone else might have thought the tangerine juice wine was great.
    I love the taste of sherry. My partner hates it. Anytime I end up with a sherrylike wine, I know he won’t really like it, but I will. We both love the lushness of raspberry and blueberry, but I dislike what I think of as stringy, insipid whites, and he thinks they are great.
    Neither of us liked the first five-gallon batch of what we termed Pink Plonk. It was too sweet. It was too thin. It was too pink. Luckily, we had some friends who adored it. David, it turns out, likes cold duck. To him, Pink Plonk was cold duck without the bubbles. To me, the bubbles are what make cold duck marginally bearable. I still respect David as a human being, but I’ll never understand his taste in wine.
    I suggest you make mostly one-gallon batches of a lot of different wines for the next couple of years, trying different fruits, vegetables, and herbs. The recipes given here are merely guidelines. Except for how you deal with the acid, most fruit wines are made the same way. Most vegetable and herb wines are made the same way. After you get the hang of it, you can range far and wide.
    It’s common for home winemakers to make only one or two kinds of wine, get used to the taste, and in the process have their taste go down the drain.
    “Oh yes, there goes Chauncy, the one who makes battery acid out of all those luscious yum yum berries every year. Sad case.”
    You need to keep your taste buds awake and moving. OK, make LOTS of the raspberry, or apple, or rhubarb,