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The older I get, the more I feel a need to know that what I did in the earlier years of my life was worth something. Nearly every day I wake up and think about how I can improve in the various endeavors I do, from cooking to writing to just being a decent human. I reflect on my failures and sometimes look back with bemusement, sometimes with regret.
I have made wine for many years. My first batch was mead made in college, and it was awful. I’d used baker’s yeast instead of proper wine yeast, and the cloudy, murky liquid that resulted tasted like bitter liquid honey bread. It was essentially prison hooch. Yech.
My first successful wine was also a honey wine, but it was made under the tutelage of my boss at the Horn of Africa, an Eritrean restaurant I worked at in Madison, Wisconsin years ago. Meselesh Ayele was a raisin of a woman, tiny, wrinkled, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed — but loyal to her employees. Meselesh made the Horn of Africa a gathering place for Madison’s African emigres, and there were a lot of them — all students or teachers at the university, where I was getting a master’s degree in African history at the time. Meselesh would bring out her tej, an Ethiopian honey wine, to special customers. It was illegal to sell, so she gave it as a gift.
Her tej was sweet, syrupy and brutally alcoholic. There was a bitter note to it from the leaves of some plant from Eritrea, where Meselesh was from. I’ve since learned it is a relative of buckthorn, which grows in North America. My tej lacked that herb, and the first time I made it the wine fermented almost dry. I liked it better than real tej, as it gave me less of a hangover.
Since then I’ve made many fruit wines and meads, including some stunners. I made a dandelion wine a decade ago that was so crispy, so dry and so floral I miss it to this day. It has a stronger hold on my memory than any store-bought white wine I’ve ever drunk. Years afterward, I held up this dandelion wine as my validation for “slumming” with fruit wines instead of the more noble grape wines I work with now.
Only one relic of my past remains. It is the final bottle of a single-gallon batch of raisin wine I made in the summer of 2005. I had a cheap corker then, and could not jam the cork into the bottle far enough, so it stuck out the end like a mushroom. I made the wine itself in a plastic, five-gallon bucket, with a huge bag of Sunmaid raisins bought at Costco.
My bible of fruit winemaking for years had been Terry Garey’s The Joy of Home Wine Making. I liked that Terry seemed like a fearless, middle-aged hippie willing to make wine out of anything — even parsnips. I tried many of her recipes, and all worked. Her raisin wine recipe said that it ages well, and might be a little like a sherry.
I like sherry. A lot. So I held back the best bottle, the “++” indicating that this was the free-run wine from the bucket, not the sediment-laden wine I squeezed out of a big jelly bag. But for two winters now — raisin wine ought to be drunk in cold weather, in my opinion — I’d passed on it.
Maybe it would suck, I thought. And after all, I had plenty of real sherry on hand, and I was making good wines with real grapes now. My 2007 Sangiovese is an excellent wine even professional critics enjoy, my 2008 Touriga is aging into a big, floral fruit bomb, and I can only imagine what the full barrel of my 2009 Graciano will mature into. So this wan little bottle of raisin wine sat there, collecting dust.
I am trying to be more diligent and seasonal with my cooking, so a few days ago I hauled out the last two venison shanks from Holly’s deer and braised them Italian style, with mushrooms, balsamic vinegar, red wine, tomato paste and a little vincotto I got from Scott over at Sausage Debauchery. I served it over mashed parsnips. It was wonderful — and needed a particular wine to go with it. The raisin wine’s time had finally come. I dusted off the bottle and had a look.
It had oxidized and evaporated in the bottle over the years. The wine was down a full inch from where I’d filled it in 2005, leaving a dangerous amount of headspace. “Oh well,” I said to Holly. “It might be terrible.” I had backup plans in mind. Maybe a Mourvedre. Maybe a Petit Verdot.
I opened the bottle. No funky aroma, which was a good sign. Then I poured some out into a wine glass. It was a beautiful amber, and crystal clear. No sediment at all. I swirled the glass, and a heady floral smell hit my nose. No alcohol blast, just an aroma a little like gardenias. I noticed the “legs” of wine flowing down the glass: They were thick and slow. This wine had some punch.
That’s when I remembered Garey’s recipe called for extra sugar, which is unusual with grape wines. It jacked the alcohol content up to probably near 18 percent, which also preserved it from that extra air.
Finally we tasted it. I swear to God if you blindfolded me I would not be able to tell it apart from a decent Amontillado. Smooth, a little caramel, but with a bright acidity I did not expect in a wine that looked like maple syrup. It is, for all intents and purposes, a fine sherry. Made from Costco raisins. In a plastic bucket.
When I sip this wine I get the same feeling that comes over me when I stumble upon something I wrote a decade ago or more, read it and still think it holds up. This does not happen often; mostly I cringe. But when it does happen, I feel a sense of relief. Maybe I didn’t suck all those years ago.
I suspect this feeling is universal. We all want to improve, and most of us do over time. In the end, we are the sum of our choices. But it is comforting to know that not all of those past choices need be dead ends and failures to validate who we are now. This little bottle of raisin wine is one small example of that. I will be sad to see it go.
I am about as far from an oenophile as one could possibly be. Suffice it to say I’m sipping a Miller Lite as I read your post. But, as soon as I saw Holly’s pic of that wine in a glass, I read the rest of the post with increasing excitement. Holy Cow! Raisins. I want some raisin wine BAD. It also made me think of dates. I love dates. Raw, used in cooking, whatever, I love dates. Have you heard of any date wines? Or date liqueur? I’m drooling, so I’ll quit before I ruin my keyboard. Great post, and pics.
Ocean: Maybe I will do a post on basic winemaking, I dunno. I just wish I could find a field of dandelions. Surprisingly, they are not that common around here…
Lang: Do it! Make that wine. You will thank yourself in the years to come.
David: I’ll drink to that!
Tamar: You are correct, Euell’s “wines” are not terribly good.
Tamar: Well said!
In the pantheon of uses for raisins, that’s way better than oatmeal cookies.
I’ll second the requests for more posts on wine-making. I’ve got some dandelion wine aging in the basement, but I don’t have confidence in it. The recipe’s from Euell Gibbons and, as big a fan I am of his, I suspect wine may not have been his long suit.
And I thought this was a food blog. Well said.
A toast – May we all look back and occasionally perceive that we didn’t suck.
This post read like poetry. Very, very nice. Great color to that wine… glad it was as good as it is beautiful!
Lovely post. The wine looks wonderful.
Nice post, Hank. Love the description of your old boss. Those raisins we meet in our young, grape skin-tight years can have a profound effect on us. You’ve got me thinking about dandelion wine again, which I thought about last year, and the year before that, and… Made my first blackberry wine this past summer and can’t wait to try it.
The author mentioned in this post has a website: https://www.joyofwine.net/
Hank — how about a basic post on wine-making then. Hmmm, maybe I better go check the site for one to be sure you have not done it first.
Holy cow, I re-read that comment and it’s barely cohesive.
Hope you get the drift regardless, I’ll try some sleep and see if that helps.
Bp
Really great post, great writing. Enjoying getting to know you and your blog and real life friends all the sudden. Reading Josh and Cazadora’s blogs too. It’s like I suddenly stumbled into a very like-minded crew, a very trippy but fun experience.
Ya’ll are inspiring me to start a new blog, that’s specific to food, foraging, hunting, fishing, cooking and especially the ethics I’ve wrestled with around these things.
Like I need a new project right now — my latest project is just going from crawling to possibly standing soon.
Anyway, great post, great blog and well met.
Yours from the Pacific N.W.,
Bp
Rock on to your success in winemaking Hank.
Mum: Sadly there is only this one bottle, but I can bring some wine to Massachusetts when I come…
Heather: Thanks for the kind words! What is the label of the Spanish wine? I’ve never seen a commercial raisin wine.
Ocean: Sorry, I never wrote the recipe down.
Russell: Good to hear that. Means there may be hope for my 2007 Tempranillo, which was not a good wine. Commercial tej? May have to try that…
Hank, you continually amaze me. The wine looks really beautiful – that color is incredible. Raisin wine. Amazing.
5 year old raisin wine, who would have thought??? Imagine some monk somewhere a thousand years ago did the same thing… in ceramic of course.
Bravo it turned out brilliantly!
Hah, I agree with you there. The first beer I ever brewed was awful beyond reason. But time and practice have improved my skills. And yeah, it’s great when age makes something surprisingly delicious. I once brewed a beer based on an actual Colonial Era recipe, with lots of molasses in it. It was horrible. So bad that I decided it was just taking up space in the fridge. The beer sat for a year near the out-vent of the fridge, at 80 degrees. Finally I gave the box away to a friend, warning him that it was horrible and hadn’t been treated kindly. A few days later he called me “Dude, this beer is amazing!” “Nah, nah, you’re just flattering me.” “No, seriously.” He brought over the last bottle. It was outstanding. Go figure.
BTW: There are a few commercial Tej makers in the US, including one in CA. Argh I can’t remember the name though. We can get it in the grocery store here, and at local Ethiopian restaurants. I believe Redstone Meadery has made one. Dogfish Head in Delaware made it, the recipe is in Sam Caglione’s Extreme Brewing. I’ve thought about making it but I haven’t found gesho to spice it with.
Recipe please.
Hank, how wonderful! When I read your writing I get such a sense of peace and a sense of time, like I stepped back to the past with you. Hope you make more raisin wine some day. I’m drinking a Spanish raisin wine these days, it’s almost like a sherry, so I’ll toast you tonight! Cheers!
Nicely written and poignant blog! That raisin wine sounds delicious. Wish I could try some with you!