Home Brew - The Aftermath

So now the dust has settled and our dreams have come to nothing, what have we learned? Not much, I think it's fair to say, except that home-made wine is harder to make than some people would have you believe. From the end of January to the start of May this Godawful stuff has been hanging around the house, both promise and threat, and to be honest the best bit was when it was fermenting in the upstairs shower, burping to itself and releasing a gentle aroma of unwashed vests from time to time. Hope is such a dreadful thing.

And now? Four bottles of red sewage are sitting among all the other bottles of professionally-made grog, looking for all the world as if they have a right to be there.

Possible courses of action:

1) Leave them another month or so in the near-mystical belief that they will somehow settle down and transform themselves into something I can pour into a glass and swallow. I did test the one bottle we opened for alcohol content and got - if I can read my hydrometer properly and manage the resulting arithmetic - a reading of 10.85% by volume, which puts it a shade stronger than Tixylix but not so as you'd want to shout about it. Sheer inertia will see to it that the remaining four hang around longer than they should, so I can see myself taking a sip in a few weeks' time, out of sheer devilry.

Probability: High

2) Tip the lot away, then go to the utility room as we grandly name it, and stare at the now redundant demijohns and other wine-making parphernalia, shaking my head and making noises between my tongue and teeth indicative of self-reproach and despair.

Probability: High

3) Try and use the DIY wine in cooking. Trouble is, I only know two recipes which seriously call for red wine, one involving chicken, the other beef. Chicken tends to come out better; beef just tastes like beef stew, even down to the stringiness of the beef, no matter what cut I use. Do I want to commit a pile of expensive ingredients to the pot, only to discover at the end of the cooking process that my homebrew has hideously denatured the lot?

Probability: Medium to low

4) Look up other people's experiences on the internet. See how common my experience is and if there's anything I can do to redeem the situation, short of spending more money on bottles of wine rectifier or sachets of re-structuring powder. Should I watch the video which came with the kit all the way through to the end? Perhaps I missed something. This, plus some time Googling my failure, could be a morning well spent. To do it, of course, I would have to have a relatively robust, positive outlook-type psychological constitution plus an attention span long enough to last a morning. I mean, on YouTube all those months ago it looked about as difficult as making a cup of coffee.

Probability: Low

5) Get rid of it by adulterating commercially-made wines with undetectably small percentages of homebrew. Actually, PK came up with this idea, inspired by the way top French winemakers introduce tiny - I mean, I%, 3% - additions of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot to a basic Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot mix to give their products a nuance, an intimation of something other. In this case, the idea would be for the principal red to smother my stuff completely rather than allow itself to be fragranced by it in any way. It would be a question of niggardly eking out. I'm tempted by this, I have to say; although if I have any sense, I'll Google the process first to see if it results in blindness or insanity and what the odds of that might be.

Probability: Medium

6) Find some other, completely alternative, use for it - cleaning the front steps with it, using it as for anti-corrosion in the car cooling system, trying it as a wood preservative, textile dye, watercolourist's medium, anti-attack spray, slug trap, tasteless practical joke, room scent (with diffuser sticks), enema, facepaint, sink degreaser, hair dye, Dadaist commentary on the middle classes, communion wine, untraceable ink for ransom notes, hair tonic, late Soviet-era borscht, hair remover.

Probability: Low to zero

7) Observe, in a moment of more hopeful lucidity, that, whatever else it may have done, my homebrew has at least given me a full but futile agenda. And an agenda, of whatever sort, is something we all need, especially as we get older. Or am I being too cheerful about this?

Probability: Borderline hundred per cent

CJ

You can read all the posts tracing our home winemaking saga in chronological order on one page here. Or you can read or download for e-readers a text-only PDF here.