Our gooseberry wine making adventures began in October when we picked gooseberries. All the recipes we found said to pour boiling water over the berries and then let them sit for 10 days, so that's what we did.
But I don't know if it was a good idea because our berries got moldy and started to ferment. The whole thing smelled strongly like vinegar.
But we pressed on. We scrapped the mold off, boiled the liquid to kill the natural yeast, mold, and anything else in there, then strained it through cheesecloth.
Then we added our own wine yeast and put it in a bottle with an airlock.
For a long time nothing happened and we were concerned that the yeast wasn't good or that the gooseberry juice was too acidic and had killed the yeast or any number of other things had occurred to prevent it from fermenting, but finally it started to bubble and we were so excited.
We had to replace our original airlock with a balloon because we needed the airlock for our apple cider. Once it started to ferment, it kept going. We were expecting it to go for about 10 days, it ended up taking about a month and a half.
Once the fermentation stopped, we began the racking process by siphoning the wine. Racking should take about 4-6 months, the goal being to let all the sediment settle out leaving us with a clear and tasty wine.
The wine is still far from done, but of course we still had to taste it at this point in the process. It was better than expected; seeing as how my expectation was for rancid gooseberry vinegar, that was not difficult. It had a tangy, fruity flavor.
1 comment:
Wow. This is serious.
Post a Comment