How to Make Elderberry Wine
If you want to make your own fruit wines – wines worthy of the snootiest wine snob – this is how to do it. I’ve been making fruit wines for 20 years, and here is my method. It requires some special equipment, a lot of patience, and a little math. But the result is more than worth it.
How to Make Verjus
Verjus, or verjuice, is the juice of unripe grapes. It is a classic French alternative to vinegar, and it is pretty easy to make. Here’s how.
Raisin Wine and Validation
Making homemade wines from raisins or other fruits instead of winegrapes can be just as satisfying as making a fine table red or a crisp white. Aged well, they can be a validation of sorts.
Making Wine and Riding the Dragon
Have you ever walked in the kind of fog where you cannot see your own outstretched hand one moment, only for the breeze to shift in the next, leaving you standing in the blinding sun? This is winemaking — a shifting series of revelations clouded by conundra. As I enter my third Crush, a vineyard double entendre for [...]
Blending Wine and Bottling Day
This is the year I graduate to becoming a middling winemaker. Making your own wine isn’t terribly difficult; inmates do it with grape juice and a piece of stale bread. Making wine you’d want to put into a bottle and store in your house for several years is another level — a level I reached [...]
Menu for Hope Winner Announced
Chez Pim has announced this year’s raffle winners for Menu for Hope, a benefit run by the food blogging multiverse to benefit a worthy cause, in this case children in the South African kingdom of Lesotho. I was both a raffle-r and an raffl-ee this time, and I must say I am pleased with the result [...]
El Dorado Mourvedre — A Very Special Wine
Last weekend Holly and I ventured up to El Dorado County to collect a batch of Mourvedre from Sumu Kaw Vineyards; it was nearly a year to the day we’d gone to the same town to gather Sangiovese grapes. Sumu Kaw. Odd name, this, but it apparently means something like “Place of the Sugar Pine” [...]
The Crush, Part II: Touriga Nacional
My patch of California is suffering from an unseasonable heat wave; we hit 98 degrees here today. Not very autumnal, I can tell you that. This means the two lots of winegrapes I have secured for this season both came ripe at the same time, more or less, which has made the past four days a frenzied [...]
The Big Drunk, Iberian Style
When it comes to wine tasting, we here at Hunter Angler Gardener Cook don’t mess around. No little sips here, no dainty sniff-n-swirls. And definitely no spit buckets. Nope. Holly and I and three of our friends gathered last weekend to try out some regional wines I’d acquired for a story I wrote about Spanish [...]
The Crush, Part I: Zinfandel
The annual grape crush is upon me, and for the first time I am making wine with my own grapes — I have four little Zinfandel vines I planted last year, and this season is their inaugural crop. It is a tentative little crop, only one bucketful. That’s only enough grapes to make 1 gallon of wine this [...]
