What To Do In The Off Season?

Well with the racing season winding down I needed to find something to occupy my free time.

I decided to do something I have been wanting to do for quite some time, Home Made Wine!

As anyone who knows me will could imagine, I did what I always do when I want to learn something new, I spend thousands of hours on the internet researching it! I spend way to much time here in front of this electric glow so why not use it wisely?

I spent a few months gathering up some basic equipment and then went for it!

Sunday we made a family project out of turning our kitchen into a make shift chemistry lab, Mal said it looked more like a meth lab... (joking of course!) We had fun with it and made a couple of batches to get us started.

The first one was a WonderWine kit I picked up off Ebay for $8. I figured not much of an investment if it goes bad! It was a small package including powdered grape juice, yeast and a clearing agent. I had know idea how long this kit sat around so I threw away the included yeast and used a new Lalvin wine yeast I had picked up. I also added a tsp of yeast nutrient to help it out. We mixed the kit in a big bowl with the amount of sugar listed to make a semi-sweet red.
Poured it into a 1 gallon glass jug and installed a bung with an airlock. (You can imagine the fun we had talking about sticking a bung plug into the bottles bung hole, Yes these are wine making terms and we do act like little kids sometimes!)

The wine started to bubble right away and the airlock bubbled off the unneeded gasses. Mal wanted to know how the yeast worked and in my most technical voice I told her that the yeast eats the sugar and poops out the booze! (Not real wine making terms!)



I will post more on this and info on the second batch latter!