Wine-Making

I enjoy making my own beer and wine. Beer it seems is more complicated and I consider it somewhat of an art. Wine, is easy in my opinion… like finger-painting. That said, I am obviously not making wine “the right way,” because I don’t add all of those chemicals and crap. I’m quite sure that I am doing it wrong, though to me personally, I only care about how it tastes a year from now.

Wine making for me, usually involves picking the fruit out in the woods. I made a raspberry wine early in July, which is still fermenting. This past Saturday, I picked a bunch of wild grapes along the river. This involved a long bicycle ride on the trails and the lengthy process of removing the stems and sorting out any undesirable things like spiders and bugs.

If you are familiar with the small, wild, purple grapes that grow in Minnesota, they are horribly tart. I have found, however, that by adding honey, I can come up with an absolutely delicious wine!

After sterilizing, cooking, straining, adding… I finally introduce the key ingredient; the yeast. The yeast quickly wakeup from dormancy and realize that they are in a wonderful “world” full of sugars just waiting for them to eat. As the yeast gorge themselves on the sugars, they begin to “poop” carbon dioxide, and more importantly; alcohol. The CO2 goes through the bubble-lock, and the alcohol begins to turn the mixture into wine that eventually is bottled and aged.

In closing, I would like to remind any wine-snobs who are at this moment looking down on my personal wine making philosophy, process or ingredients; that in the end, we are all just drinking yeast poop.