No Wine Before Its Time

The difficulty in applying the golden rule of wine drinking, drink no wine before its time, is that it is not easy to determine when its time is. This turned out to be especially true for these two wines. With home-made wines, where you don't calibrate the level of acidity, tannins, or filter, etc, estimating age until peak is especially difficult. The only upper hand you have is that you produce so much wine for so little cost you can take a bottle out every year to taste it, and if its not good just dump and wait until next year.

The recipe for the peach wine said it was a light bodied wine (due to the white grape must base) and it would be in its prime in 6 months, and definitely past in 12. It never tasted very good, but I never had the heart to dump them, as I loved that little peach tree. Kelly's great grandmother planted it from a pit of a tasty peach at the lake house we used to have, but the tree got killed off in the winter after we harvested the fruit for this wine. So, I just never could bring myself to dump it. We hit a critical shortage of white wine last week, and I decided to brush the cob webs off one of these bottles. It was awesome. Very peachy, but not in the way fruit wines that are just spiked with flavorng are. It was peach wine, everything I had hoped for when I made it. And based on how nicely 5 1/2 extra years treated this wine, I bet another year will make it even better. Now comes the period of trying to slow down consumption until you really do hit the peak.

The apple wines were not from a recipe. Kelly worked at an orchard one fall, and I got into a little competition with the owner over who made the best apple wine. His recipe was to fill a 5 gallon bucket with a secret blend of cider, add a lump of beef (god knows what for), let it ferment throught the fall (with wild yeast, obviously), and leave it outside over winter to freeze-distill it. This is known colloquially as apple jack, and is a very old fashioned LaFayette recipe. The downside is that it can make you blind, or worse. Really. I never had any.

My "recipe" was to make 6 different varietal apple wines. I started with the 6 gallons of cider Kelly hand-pressed from specific apple varieties (one variety per gallon) into plastic gallon milk jugs. I simply drew off a cup of cider from each container, added sugar until I got an SG for a 12% wine, pitched some red star dry white wine yeast, and added an airlock. I bulk fermented them in these low budget primaries for over a year, and then racked them straight into bottles with sorbate and no extra sugar. The honeycrisp and gala peaked early, followed by the cortland and now the empire. Again, none of them were great, but they were drinkable. I sampled one of the remaining bottles of empire wine, and as the picture indicates, it was very drinkable. I think the lesson here is that the more tannin, the longer it takes to age, but the better it will be. Another lesson is to not bulk age on the lees in your primary, as the morning after I drank this bottle with dinner, I was actually hung over, indicating there were a lot of esthers and byproducts from fermenting on the lees. Good thing I did not try the apple jack. If I make apple wine again, I will bulk age in secondaries after racking twice, and then filter and blend the varieties for bottling.