In the picture, small bottles from left to right: commercial wine from Desert Wind Winery (no affiliation), Strawberry Wine, Joe's Mattioli's Ancient Orange Mead (name of the recipe) and Triple Berry Wine. In the back from left to right: fortified and sweetened Triple Berry, Sweetened Triple Berry, Apple wine.
Friday, we had to go for a bit of a drive to buy some corks, a corker and some other odds and ends. And while we were at it we went wine tasting here:
Desert Wind Winery (no affiliation).
Tasty stuff! Then we went for pizza and wine. And went to another winery for dessert: Bookwalter Wines Chocolate dessert and red wine! Yum!
Saturday, I dragged myself out of bed and bottled strawberry wine (5 bottles) and mead(4 bottles). And of course taste tested.
Sunday I dealt with the triple berry wine and the apple wine. Both of these are three gallon batches. I bottled 1 gallon (5 bottles) of the triple berry. I sweetened another gallon and put in a gallon jug with an airlock. The last gallon I fortified with vodka and sweetened and put in a gallon jug with an airlock. Much tasting was needed to get the right level of sweetness!
I don't want to bottle those two gallons yet, because I want to make sure the additional sugars don't cause the wines to start fermenting again. Re-fermenting in a wine bottle is unsafe (a.k.a. "bottle bomb").
The apple wine, I racked (transferred to another container) off the sediment and sweetened. Of course had to taste test it! This and the remainder of the triple-berry I plan to bottle in a couple of weeks.
Now, it's Tuesday and I think I've recovered from all that tasting! I've been working on some labels for my bottled wine. Here are some rough sketches. Ignore any text, I've decided to make my life easier and add text via Photoshop. It will also allow me to use label designs again by just modifying text.
Also, the final labels will be in black and white.
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| Triple Berry |
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| Mead |
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| Strawberry |
Awesome...the most I ever did was years ago when I made beer...the ex didn't like it but it tasted pretty good to me. Have never tried wine! So bravo! I like the label sketches...you make your own wine and the labels for the bottles...how creative is that?
ReplyDeleteI would like to try making beer one of these days. I'm still new to wine making - these are my first batches. And I hoping to get some mead started in the next few days.
ReplyDeleteThank-you! :)