What's Wine without Food?

Katie has wanted to get a smoker since we got married, and a few weeks ago that wish finally came true. 

We started out with something fairly straightforward and smoked a beer can chicken, which required a run to the liquor store since we didn't have any beer cans.  I was pretty proud of the final product.

We spent the first weekend of April outside doing yard work and starting on the garden. We cleaned off the fence in the backyard and put up new chicken wire around the garden to slow down the bunny invasion.

We spent most of Saturday hacking away at small limbs and vines along the fence.  We wound up with a couple more bags of leaves and debris, but now we have to figure out some way to hide the bare spots and ragged chain link fence on the neighbor's side.

Our second round with the smoker was half a pork shoulder.  We used a combination of mesquite and apple chips to smoke it, and used Oklahoma Joe's rub to season it.  The picture hardly does it justice.

Bad Start to a New Batch

Last Friday we started a new batch of wine, a dry Johannisberg Riesling. We got off to a faster start than our first batch. Just a little experience made things go quite a bit smoother than the first time around. We got our equipment set up and sanitized and broke out our new spoon to stir in additives.

After we got everything prepped it was time to pour the juice from the kit bag to the bucket, which is when things went horribly wrong. The juice bag had about four gallons of semi-concentrated juice. To that we were supposed to add about two gallons of water to make up the six-gallon total for the batch. I wound up losing the spout on the bag and pouring about half a gallon of juice all over the dining room floor.

It was kind of like the scene in A Christmas Story when Ralphie knocked the lug nuts into the sewer drain, and, like Ralphie, I didn't say "fudge." The thing about concentrated riesling juice is that it is apparently saturated with sugar. Everything the juice touched turned incredibly sticky. After cleaning up most of the mess we had to figure out what to do with the batch we had. Our specific gravity was way off, and the balance is probably going to be thrown off on the final product. To get the specific gravity up to the level it's supposed to be at we had to add THREE POUNDS of sugar. We should be close to finishing up the primary fermentation after a week. We'll see how things turn out.

Labeling

We had a bit of a false start labeling today. Katie put together a design we were both happy with and had been sitting on since we started making this batch over a month ago. We even got fancy label paper with glossy labels that was supposed to be compatible with ink jet printers. Turns out, not so much. A couple of test labels that we printed two weeks ago still had wet ink, so we bailed on that. Instead we broke out labels that we had planned on using for later batches, and we're both happier with the new design. The original had all the same information and basic layout but no pictures.


We decided to call our brand Hackmans' Uphill Hike because when we were in Switzerland Katie made the observation that it seemed like every time we went on a hike it was always uphill. My response was, "We're in the Alps, what did you expect?"

Since we started our first batch the day before my 30th birthday and we both turn 30 this year, we called this batch Turning Thirty. According to Winexpert, the company that manufactured the kit, the Australian Cabernet/Shiraz is "[t]he blend that made Australia famous. Cabernet Sauvignon's structural intensity perfectly complements the ripe fruit and chocolate flavors of Shiraz, for rich, complex and hearty red wine of outstanding character. Big, bold and dark a luxurious treat." We'll see if it turns out that way.


We have two more kits on the way this week, a Riesling and a Supertuscan. We're looking forward to making them both. We've switched the schedule up and will be starting the Riesling next week. That way we'll have two batches ready to drink by the 2010 Hackman Open; the Supertuscan will take a while longer to make and be ready to drink. The big challenge we're going to have making this many batches is going to be scavenging enough empty bottles.

Bottling

We finished our first batch and bottled it without incident. We already did a "dry" run with the auto-siphon and filler stem using water, which made it much easier.

Step one was to rinse and sanitize all of our bottles and equipment.


After sanitization we took a final hydrometer reading to calculate our alcohol percentage. We finished off at 12.4-12.5% alcohol, which should mean we fermented all the available sugar in the juice.

Naturally, the next step was to sniff and sample.


Katie took care of filling.

And Aaron corked.


We finished with just over 30 bottles. Bottle number 31 didn't get a cork, so it won't last very long. We're in the process of finishing it off while prepping this post. Tomorrow we'll finish the labels and reveal our brand and vintage.

Side Project #1

One of the extra costs involved with our new hobby is the need to store a larger quantity of bottles on their sides than we ever have before. Being a Hackman I wasn't going to spend $80 to $100 on a rack that holds forty bottles to put in the basement, knowing that we'd only have to buy a second when we finish our next batch. So we went to Home Depot and I bought some 1"x10"s to build my own bins. Total cost: $34. Just some wood glue and screws; the cross-pieces are notched in the middle and held in place by tension at the corners.

That's the current extent of our wine collection, but each bin should hold forty bottles. Hopefully we have some success and get those filled with our own wines by the end of the year.

Racking

With both of us going out of town, we had to cut a day off the schedule and rack a week after clarifying. We had plenty of sediment in the bottom of the carboy, though.


With only one carboy we racked from the carboy back to our bucket. No pictures dumping the sediment and rinsing the carboy. Can't say it was exactly appetizing. After rinsing and sanitizing the carboy, we racked a second time. It's only a matter of time before we get a second carboy to expand our production.


Now to wait two more weeks or so 'til we bottle.

Clarifying

Following our final specific gravity check, we grabbed a quick sample to sniff and taste. Fortunately, it smelled and tasted like actual wine.

Stabilizing and clarifying involves binding the suspended sediment with an additive to force it to settle to the bottom. One of the steps of this process is "vigorous stirring," so I got an extra toy following the recommendation of a coworker.

It looks pretty ugly after the clarifying and stirring, but after a week it looked pretty clear.

Rookie Vintners

Over the last several months, Katie and I had been talking about starting to brew our own beer or wine. After an inordinate amount of research and discussion, we decided on wine, and in the spirit of Mythbusters if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. We went to Bacchus and Barleycorn and bought all the equipment and supplies we'd need (minus bottles) to brew a six-gallon batch. We decided on an Australian Cabernet/Shiraz blend, something we thought it would be tough to screw up too badly.

We started our batch on January 17. Prior to mixing all the ingredients in the primary fermenter we sanitized all the equipment with a sulfite solution, which gave both of us coughing fits and a burning nose. So after we blended the juice, water, and additives; checked the specific gravity (1.087); and put the air lock in the lid of the bucket, we were on our way. For the next week, the first floor of the house smelled like rising bread.

After a week, we checked the specific gravity again and transferred the batch to a carboy for a secondary fermentation.
Once our specific gravity stabilized, (0.994) after eight days we were ready to stabilize and clarify.