Wine Making

Our first vintage; a sweet white muscadine wine

In 2012 we had a GREAT crop of muscadine grapes so I tried my hand at wine making. The result was a pretty good (if I must say so, myself) muscadine sweet white wine. After 9 months of fermenting and racking, we put up 16 bottles of wine, one of which I am sipping on this evening.

We were not so lucky in 2013. Once again, we had a great crop of muscadines. Unfortunately this time, some critter ate them all before we could pick them. There were muscadine hulls under the grape vines, the pear trees and the apple trees. It was very frustrating and happened so quickly! I managed to harvest about 10 grapes last year - not quite enough to make a batch of wine.

In fact, 2013 was not a good year for any home-grown fruit. Our peach tree died, the pear trees didn't produce any pears. The apples were pathetic, the plums were sparse and you know the story of the grapes.

A small sampling of our 2012 grapes.

Since we didn't have any good fruit this year, I wanted to try my hand at making mead. Mead is a wine made from honey. After a little research, I decided I wanted to make a melomel. Melomel is a mead with fruit added to the mix.

I had a little free time this evening, so I decided to start a batch of melomel. It sounded much more tasty than just plain old honey wine. I could not find one recipe I liked so I decided to take the best of the ones I saw. I decided on a raspberry and honey combo. It sounded good.

So, after an evening of cleaning, boiling, and mixing, we have a bucket of raspberry melomel must sitting under the kitchen table fermenting for the next few weeks. In 3-5 weeks the primary fermentation will be complete and I will transfer it from the current bucket into a 3 gal carboy to sit for another 5 months or so.

More to follow as we progress in the process....

Here is the recipe I used to make the brew. It's pretty basic:

140 oz Honey - about 9 pounds - (note: All the recipes I saw said to use the best honey available - preferably orange blossom honey. This being an experimental batch, and fresh honey being quite pricey, I decided to go budget with Food Lion brand honey. I don't even know if I like mead, but it sounded interesting.
2 Bags of Frozen raspberries
1 pkg Red Star Montrachet Yeast
3t yeast nutrient

Some recipes call for the addition of orange and/or lemon juice, which sounded good, but I didn't have any on hand.