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..are there any homebrewers in the house?

Just curious.

-Cain

I brew. I don't mix with guns though. I do love a good stout.

No I don't brew but there are some cool ones in the fridge and now you've got me thinking.....

I haven't brewed beer in over half a decade, BUT I make my own wine! Love it!

My family used to make 200 gallons of wine a year. My dad was quite the connoisseur. We made both a red and a white wine, and we called ourselves the Chateau Poe Winery (my dad was a Lit professor). We even trampled the grapes by foot. We had labels made up, and we called the red Chateau Poe, and the white was Chateau Ligeia. I remember that the label for the red had a pen & ink rendition of a regurgitating raven on it, with the caption "Nevermore, nevermore!"

True story, but there are no guns in it.

200 gallons is a tremendous amount. What did they do with all their equipment?

I've wanted to get started at it for years, but never have.

KBCraig wrote:I've wanted to get started at it for years, but never have.

drw wrote:200 gallons is a tremendous amount. What did they do with all their equipment?

200 gallons is (or was at the time) the legal limit you could make for personal (as opposed to commercial) consumption. My parents were both Caltech professors, and my dad also served in various administrative capacities there - positions which required a lot of entertaining. A lot of that wine was consumed at those parties.

We used 10 gallon carboy bottles to make the wine in. We used borrowed lab equipment to siphon off any dissolved sulfur gasses (at the time, a lot of California grapes were treated on the vine with some kind of sulfur based compound to ward off a certain type of disease, and it had the tendency to impart a very slight sulfurous taste to the wine if you didn't siphon it off). The grapes were trampled in large galvanized tubs.

The last batch we made was in the late 1970s, and the last bottle of it was consumed on my son's birth in 1990 (and just 4 months before my dad became terminally ill). My parents had moved three times since the late 1970s, so I have no idea what happened to all of the carboys. The lab equipment went back to the lab, I'm sure. The galvanized tubs were likely put to some other long since forgotten use.

In the intervening years, I seem to have developed an allergy or something to wine. Whenever I drink it, my sinuses pack up and I get a headache - long before ever really feeling the effects of the alcohol. So I never do any more than just taste a little bit now and then.

That's a real bummer. I'd be willing to bet that you developed a sensitivity to sulfites at some point. It would be interesting to see how you react to a sulfite free wine, or at least a wine with extremely low sulfites. Most modern wines are swimming in them, they use them so much.

drw wrote:I'd be willing to bet that you developed a sensitivity to sulfites at some point. It would be interesting to see how you react to a sulfite free wine, or at least a wine with extremely low sulfites. Most modern wines are swimming in them, they use them so much.

The same thing happened to me. As you probably know, the red wines have more sulfites than the whites. I have switched to whites, and don't have an issue.

drw wrote:200 gallons is a tremendous amount.

Not really. That's only 4 barrels.

Years ago, I worked as a research scientist in a winery. In addition to evaluating large-scale production equipment, I also made thousands of small [5 gallon] batches of wine for my experiments. We actually used one of those wooden presses with the screw to press the grapes. It was interesting work, but after doing all of this I never really wanted to do it at home. It was fun, but hard work and low pay. Some of the "fringe benefits" were pretty good.

I always tell people that at my job interview, it was the only time an employer ever asked if I liked wine, and if I had said "no" they wouldn't have hired me.

ooohhh...Wine! Now we're talking (although I am still a beer fan primarily)

Anyone ever do the Texas Wine Trail in the Hill Country? I'd put some of our own Texas wine against Napa any day of the week! Some of the best Cab Sauv and Muscato I have ever had has come from the Hill Country.

But I'd still prefer sitting out on my back porch with a Paulaner Hefeweizen or a Warstenier Dunkelweise.

You need to be careful. If you invite your neighbors over to sample it and they pay you for any, you could accidently turn your own home into a 51% location!

drw wrote:That's a real bummer. I'd be willing to bet that you developed a sensitivity to sulfites at some point. It would be interesting to see how you react to a sulfite free wine, or at least a wine with extremely low sulfites. Most modern wines are swimming in them, they use them so much.

That's why we used the siphoning system - to take off the sulfites. My memory might be faulty about this, but I recall that the grapes were dusted with a sulfur based compound to treat some kind of rot/mold/fungus/critter infestation. Even with rinsing off the grapes before crushing, not all of this sulfur is removed, and so it gets into the juice and hence into the wine. We corked the carboys with a glass tube coming out of the cork that went to a valve that was in turn connected to a faucet. Running the water from the faucet created a vacuum in the carboy, which would cause the dissolved sulfurs to "boil" out of solution and escape via the tubing into the water stream. The system did work. There was a noticeable improvement in the taste of the wine between the first batch, where we did not do this, and the second batch when we did.

It has never occurred to me that my problem might be sensitivity to sulfites. I'll have to look into that, because I do enjoy a nice wine. I pretty much stopped drinking it because the allergic type reaction took the pleasure out of it.

The Annoyed Man wrote:That's why we used the siphoning system - to take off the sulfites. My memory might be faulty about this, but I recall that the grapes were dusted with a sulfur based compound to treat some kind of rot/mold/fungus/critter infestation. Even with rinsing off the grapes before crushing, not all of this sulfur is removed, and so it gets into the juice and hence into the wine.

I know mine is too, but I think your memory may be faulty. I am not saying you didn't do it this operation, but have never heard of a process like this that removed sulphur compounds from the juice. Sulfites dissolve in juice and water so they can't be decanted off.

At the winery, we never rinsed or washed the grapes. The vineyards were managed by another group, so I don't know what they used to protect the grapes from bugs, fungii, rot, etc. After picking, the grapes went from the trucks and then directly into the crusher. Potassium metabisulfite was sprinkled over the grapes right before they went into the crusher. This is done to kill wild yeast and bacteria and to prevent oxidation. The metabisulfite/SO2 level is monitored and adjusted throughout the fermentation, ageing and bottling processes.

BTW - the same metabisulfite was used in many restaurants to keep salads from turning brown. After it was found that some people were allergic and had asthma-type reactions they stopped using it. I think it's illegal now.