The SEDIMENT Home Winemaking Saga
Home Brew
20th September 2018
CJ
So
PK is all of a tizzy because he can get a bottle of red wine for under
£4.00. Seriously. It's as if the fine range of sub-£4.00 bottles
available from Lidl Aldi or Asda never existed, but there you are:
some people don't know what's going on in the world. I mean, I could
have told him about these cheap boozes without even bothering to look
them up.
Then
it occurs to me, PK's blind spots or not: if we are really, really,
determined to go low, there is a trick which both of us have missed
so far - making
our own.
To be frank, this first entered my head a few months ago when I was
killing time in a hardware store in south-west Wales and ended up
staring at a section of DIY wine kits (see pic). I mean, here was a
real choice, not just a few makeweights to keep the shelves from
looking empty. There was home brew Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon,
Chardonnay (Chardonnay!), Zinfandel, even some others that I might
have missed. Yes, extreme south-west Wales, the ultima
thule
of the A477, is the kind of place where you have to make your own
entertainment, it's a fair old drive from where I was to sexy
Haverfordwest, you have to improvise. So why not boil up some
Chardonnay now that the evenings are getting longer?
Of
course I failed to buy a kit while I was there - and only £20,
reduced to clear - but I can still load up online with Shiraz/Merlot
kits, Malbec kits, Pinot Grigio kits, Frascati kits, Primitivo kits,
Australian Character kits whatever they are, a whole world of kits,
most holding out the scarcely-credible promise of a drinkable wine
for no more than £1.00 a bottle. Prices are a touch stiffer if buy
the gear online rather than in a discount Welsh hardware store,
nearer the £30.00 mark for some kits, £70.00 for the authentically
hardcore setups that include a 30-litre bucket, steriliser,
instructional DVD and all sorts, but the more you make the greater
the savings and how can you put a price on that kind of value?
And
it's so easy to do! Even if you don't have an instructional DVD,
there are YouTubes galore, men, usually men, clanking about in
their kitchens and garages and dens, optimising your chances of
getting a really satisfactory brew out of whatever materials you have
to hand. My favourites? Craig, here, apparently startled to find
himself in a roomful of plastic buckets and pipes with a camera
pointing at him, but prepared to make a go of it nonetheless;
something called Sonoran Living, in which a magenta woman and a
plainly angry man show us an authentically disgusting assemblage of
things to make wine out of; and this, disarmingly unidirectional vid,
in which a bloke in a shirt takes out the contents of a wine kit,
puts them on a table and tells us what they are.
The
rest of it is just tipping powders and grape juice (or your own
grapes, crushed; or indeed any other organic matter) into plastic
tubs, cleaning up the inevitable mess and walking away. And then
coming back and putting the product in bottles. As my pal with the
home-made champagne observed a while ago, wine-making, in comparison
with beer-making, 'Is a mug's game. It's so easy.' To put it another
way, if my Father-in-Law can, or at least could, make a potable wine,
so can I.
Next
step? Getting PK involved. After all, I don't want all
the bother of washing out bottles or admixing the acidity correction,
let alone pouring out the final brew and corking it up. Not only is
he fitter and stronger than me, he has a talent for pickiness which
is exactly what we need in a tightly controlled situation like this.
Actually, now I think about it, is £1.00 a bottle really such a
bargain, given the amount of faffing around involved and the almost
certain vileness of the final wine? Or can we get it down to 50p? If
the latter, then a bottle of anything with Château
Sediment
label might prove irresistible.
That has to be the goal. I'll put it to him, next time I see him.
Home Brew II
4th October 2018
CJ 
So
I put the idea of making our own booze to PK and, to my slight
astonishment, he says, Well, maybe we should. I say, Really? He says
Yes, and goes on to reveal that his Father used to make rhubarb wine
which he left to mature in the pantry of the old family home, where
it used to explode from time to time. We'd be sitting there, he says,
and there'd be a crash
and we'd know another bottle had gone. Really? I say, again, and he
nods. Things you learn.
So
then I explain about the kits and the YouTubes I've been half-arsedly
scrutinising and the muck you apparently have to put in your mixing
tub and where
do you keep it all for the love of God? And
he nods and says, Well it sounds quite interesting. Maybe we should
do one each and compare them.
This
is not what I was anticipating, not at all. Where is the regulation
issue PK, with all his la-di-da beverages and do's and don'ts and
wide-ranging shibboleths? My bluff appears to have been called,
inadvertently or otherwise (how was I to know about his Dad and the
rhubarb wine?) and now I have to make it seem that what I wanted all
along, was to make my own wine. Actually, what I really wanted was
for PK to volunteer to do everything, leaving me with the relatively
easy job of sage onlooker, but life isn't like that. So I nod back at
him, committing myself at the very least to a fresh trawl through the
internet for tips and materials.
Back
at the screen, the first thing is to weed out the American
contributors, with their remorseless positivity and their facial
hair. That done, I find myself back with this guy - the one who
previously contented himself with merely showing the world the
contents of a Wilko wine box, but who is now, affably enough, taking
us through the process of making a complete Cabernet Sauvignon Wilko
wine. He's from the Wirral, I'm guessing, somewhere Merseyside
anyway, and his approach to film-making has some of the deconstructed
grammar of the French New Wave, the same non-hierarchical approach to
narrative and the nature of reality, but it hangs together. And he's
wearing shorts.
In
fact it's a pleasure to watch him mix the brew, apparently with the
least possible forethought (the memory card in his camera runs out a
third of the way through; he hasn't bought himself a plastic funnel)
and fretting over what his wife will say about the marks on the
dining table. At some point, it's true, I start to lose focus and
gaze instead on YouTube's suggestions for what I might want to watch
next (a brief history of electric guitar distortion; Seinfeld
outtakes) and then, a bit later on, I skip forward to see how he's
managing, but it all looks straightforward enough. He's got some
fancy gear - a big old demijohn and an airlock to go in the bung -
and he's clearly done it before, showing no nervousness around the
various packets and sachets that come out of the Wilko box like deep
space rations, and sure enough I start to feel that, given time and
practice, I could manage the same level of dextrous ease. The whole
thing, fermentation included, seems to take about a week and a half. I could find that time.
And no actual grapes involved.
Only
snag? At the end of the process, he siphons the proto-wine off into
some washed-out old screwtop wine bottles, serves it up (not shown in
video) and pronounces it good. Now, I reckon if we're dealing with a
ten-day-old wine, then screwtops should be perfectly adequate. PK, on
the other hand, is thinking of giving the wine he hasn't actually
made yet a chance to lose some of its chemical textures and arrogant
youthfulness by laying it down: which means, he says, corks. Which in
turn means, if I were to match him all the way, that I would have to
buy some wines which came in bottles that had corks in them. I mean,
six fancier than usual wines with actual corks, plus the demijohn,
plus the airlock, plus the kit itself, it's starting to stack up.
Given that the whole, or nearly the whole, point is to get wine for
next to nothing, this is the wrong direction of travel. Still. I'm
seeing him again in a couple of weeks; a fresh item on the agenda.
So
the kit has arrived. Not the gear I was originally toying with, but -
following a discussion with PK - a starter pack from Lovebrewing,
containing a Beaverdale Cabernet Shiraz ingredients box as well as a
couple of demijohns, a siphon, a thermometer, hydrometer, all sorts.
And he's acquired the same set, too, so that we can both attempt the
same muck and compare our results.The tension is palpable.
Gentleman Winemaker Me
7th February 2019
PK
I’m sure it wasn’t like this for Baron Eric de Rothschild.
For some reason, I have gone along with CJ’s crackpot idea of making our own wines. It is one thing for him to try and emulate or even better the bottom-shelf bargain wines that he buys; quite another for me to try and echo the classier products that I pursue.
But then I considered the respect I have for the makers of my wines. Perhaps becoming a winemaker, albeit a modest one, could be a means of claiming first-name terms with the likes of “fellow winemaker” (as I could rightfully call him) Eric. Or with Aubert at the Domaine de la Romanée Conti. I might acquire the urbanity of someone like Leoville-Barton’s distinguished Anthony Barton. I certainly echo his philosophy that “I don’t make investment wines”. No indeed, not in my kitchen.
I had kept quiet at home about this mad plan of CJ’s, and hidden the equipment, and a hoard of my empty bottles, in the cellar,. I anticipated an unfavourable reaction from Mrs K to the idea of liquids fermenting around the house (or, as I must begin to call it, the proprieté). She did, it emerged, wonder why our recycling had been uncharacteristically light on bottles. But she seemed remarkably relaxed when I broached the plan, her first and only real anxiety being that she might have to taste the results.
And so it begins, although I remain disdainful of CJ’s use of the term “Home Brew”, just as I am troubled by purchasing wine-making equipment from a company called Lovebrewing. This is vinification, surely,
I, too, watch the briskly enthusiastic brewlover Richard making wine in his t-shirt and jeans. He does not reflect my vision of an urbane gentleman winemaker. He sports a t-shirt from an outdoor apparel company, and stubble unrelated to a designer. Unlike CJ I do not become fixated by the contents of his washing machine, but I do notice that the on-screen caption suggests he is “sterlising” (sic), an attention to detail on my part which I hope will prove beneficial.
For I am nothing if not a stickler for detail when it comes to recipes. I am indeed (as I explained to Julian Barnes when he gave us our André Simon Award, a Pedant In The Kitchen. So I am concerned that the airlock I have been sent has a yellow cap, and not, as referred to in the accompanying instructions, red. This is the kind of thing which can lead to disaster.
Anyway, I plump for making cabernet sauvignon, as close as I can get to my beloved claret. With increasing confidence I wield the likes of hydrometer and airlock. I sterilise, and mix, and test. (Well, do you know the exact temperature of the hot water from your tap? Well, do you?) I mix in oak chips, because I’m short on barrels.
And finally I have a demijohn of foaming liquid, coloured a threatening purple, which I stash carefully away. I have somewhat gratifying stains of grape juice on my hands, although before Mrs K returns I carefully clean the somewhat less gratifying stains of grape juice off the kitchen surfaces.
I managed to persuade Mrs K to allow the wine to ferment in the currently warmest place in the house, where we dry our laundry – but in order to protect the surroundings, I must keep my demijohn inside a binliner, inside a bucket. Is that really necessary? Well, the instructions say that if fermentation becomes “quite lively”, then “liquid can be forced out of the airlock and end up decorating your floor and walls!”. Not a situation Eric probably had to deal with – or worse, explain to his wife.
Now, the waiting begins. But at least there is one aspect of this where I feel I may have gained ground over CJ. I have come up with a suitable name for my wine (no, no, you’ll have to wait) and have begun designing an appropriate label. This at least may have the sophistication, the style, which I aim for in the wines that I enjoy. Whether the wine itself will live up to that, time will tell.
Gentleman Winemaker II
7th March 2019
PK
Last summer Jay McInerney wrote in Town & Country
about a dinner hosted at Chateau Lafite by Baron Rothschild. “Clad in a
slightly rumpled double-breasted navy linen blazer,” he wrote, “[Baron
Rothschild] exudes a warmth that helps counteract his imposing height,
good looks, and pedigree.”
Of all the descriptions applied there to Baron Rothschild, the only one which applies to me is “slightly rumpled”. Or, sometimes, “clad”.
Yet my progress towards becoming, like the Baron, a gentleman winemaker, moves on. For weeks of fermentation, my involvement in this home winemaking carry-on has been limited to mere observation. And this I could pursue in a gentlemanly manner, sometimes clad, and sometimes even in slightly rumpled attire.
There was little to report during this time, apart from a warm, yeasty smell, an occasional gurgle and, as the demijohn was sitting safely inside one of them, a critical shortage of buckets when it came to washing the car. I mean, how many buckets does the average householder possess?
But the time then arrived for the next stage of actual activity, in which the fermented wine has to be siphoned off its lees in demijohn 1 and into demijohn 2. This involves a sort of Professor Branestawm set-up, all of which has to be “sterlised” (sic). And to keep a certain other member of the household happy, I had to do it in the bath, in case there was any kind of spillage. Or, indeed, any remaining notion of sophistication.
Thanks to my Easy Start siphon, the “wine” (as perhaps I can now call it) surged through the tube. The key thing here was to banish from my mind the recurrent images of someone on the TV having a colonic.
The wine then had to be agitated at least three times a day for three to four days. Well, I tried telling it that Liverpool might win the Premier League, a notion which agitates me a lot, but it seemed that wasn’t sufficient. No, I had to hoist the demijohn up and physically shake it, the instructions say “for 3 or 4 minutes”. Do you realise how long that actually is? I mean, Bez or Baz or Bozo, whatever his name was, looked pretty knackered after shaking maracas on a three-minute single, and he was better fuelled than me. I’m really not up to hefting 4.5 kilos of wine around for 4 minutes at a time. I presume that Baron Rothschild has a machine to do this for him. Or a peasant.
So I decided that “3 or 4 minutes” was a euphemism, as in “I’ll savour this wine in my mouth for 3 or 4 minutes before I swallow it”.
I shan’t baffle you with the technical terms used by those of us in the winemaking game, but a sequence follows over several days of adding stuff, shaking, waiting, then repeating. In the end, you add some more stuff, which is clearly both non-vegan and non-natural and fine by me. Then “shake for ten seconds to mix, and replace cap.” What, you shake it for ten seconds without a cap? Are they mad? Never mind a demijohn of red wine, I wouldn’t do that with a recalcitrant ketchup bottle.
The next stage, bottling, will be pursued in about a week, “when the wine is clear”. Frankly, I may have no idea whether it is clear or not, because it is red. If it goes literally clear, something has gone horribly wrong. Or I have succeeded in turning wine into water.
A Gentleman Winemaker's Wine
4th April 2019
PK
What
is this stylish looking wine? Its visual combination of contemporary
style with classic elements seems like a reflection of my very own
character. Surely the wine of a gentleman winemaker. And its
name…Piqué…why, it sounds like a Gallicisation of its creator – moi.
Yes, having made my own wine over the last eight weeks, it has now been bottled and, as you can see, named and labelled. I have a degree of smug self-satisfaction at having thought of its name, and designed a label, with the added suspicion that CJ will not have bothered with either.
(I was of course worried about emulating those hideous phonetic names drawn from initials, like PeeKay, or SeeJay, which reek of rundown shopfronts and County Court Judgments. But I feel that Piqué offers a more… sophisticated approach.)
Love my house as I do, not even I could call it a chateau. But I can genuinely state that Piqué was indeed mis en bouteille àu propriété. Which also looks better on the label than mis en bouteille dans la salle de bain.
Like so many aspects of this winemaking saga, bottling proved more challenging than I had anticipated. For one thing, when you siphon wine out of a demijohn, the hose swings around like an angry snake, spewing red wine all over the option. You’re trying to simultaneously tilt the demijohn, keep the hose inside a bottle, and pump the, er, pump. I clearly lack that key requirement of a wine bottler – three hands.
Then there was the issue of the sediment. This sat in a corner of the demijohn, an ominous slurry. It proved impossible to reach the last half-bottle or so of wine in the demijohn without sucking the sediment up, so eventually I improvised a filter, using a funnel and a tea strainer. It’s a little trick I would like to say I picked up from the Baron de Rothschild, except that I didn’t.
Somehow, at the end of it all, I had five bottles of wine. Not six, but five. CJ reports exactly the same; we each started with 4.5 litres, but ended up with only five bottles, 3.75 litres. Could all of that have gone in sediment, or even evaporation? The part des anges? I can’t believe that angels would sink to the level of sharing this stuff, even those bored with occupying the head of a pin,
Labelling added a whole new and challenging aspect to the bottling process: in particular, removing the existing labels from a week’s worth – sorry, a fortnight’s worth, hem hem – of emptied bottles. Like stamps and matchbox labels, it was once simple to soak off wine labels in warm water. That was before self-adhesion entered the process. A word from the wise (well, from me); put hot water inside the bottle, which can melt the adhesive on the back of the label.
The label still may not come off in one piece; if it does, you are likely to have a label which remains furiously self-adhesive. And if it does not adhere to self, it may well adhere to anything on which you place it. Another word from the wise (after the event): if there is one thing from which it is harder to remove a self-adhesive label than a bottle, that thing is a table.
But finally, the job was done. Piqué has been bottled in dark shouldered claret bottles, dark sloping Burgundy bottles and pale green screwcap bottles more commonly associated with white wines. This could either be a maneouvre in order to test the market, or a reflection of the variety of wines I was drinking when I needed some empty bottles.
And now it is “maturing”. The bottles are still inside a bucket, in case of explosion, although I have hopefully got beyond that stage. The final chapter will be a comparative tasting against CJ’s efforts. All I can now anticipate is that mine will possibly look better.
The Great SEDIMENT Wine Tasting
2nd May 2019
PK
“Well…
life all comes down to a few moments,” says Bud Fox, just before he
goes into Gordon Gekko’s office for the first time in the movie Wall Street. “And this is one of 'em...”
It was time to taste our home-made wines, the culmination of a project which CJ finally steered us into some three months ago . The equipment had been bought, the technology mastered, the wines made, bottled and matured (and, in one case at least, labelled). We had avoided potential spillages, floods and fermentation explosions. Now for the dangerous bit.
There were three wines on the night. There was Piqué, created of course by myself, PK; there was a wine garishly labelled Lobo e Falcao, a label which Mrs K mistakenly believed that CJ had created himself, until it was explained that he had, typically, just reused an old empty bottle; and, as a control, there was a “professional” bottle, of Waitrose Soft Chilean red, which is CJ’s £4.99 staple.
Sadly we were unable to replicate the tastings of homemade wine which appear widely on YouTube. Those seem to go quite well, and nearly always end with someone raising their glass and saying something like, “Y’know, it’s really not bad at all!” However, we simply couldn’t go along with two of their common aspects, which are that most of them seem to be conducted by chaps in (a) cheaply equipped utility rooms, and (b) shorts.
Our own tasting was conducted blind, in which we were ably assisted by our spouses; while we waited outside the room, the wines were poured into glasses A, B and C by our lovely assistants (© Debbie McGee). This 30-second audio clip will introduce you to some sounds rarely heard at formal wine tastings, and give you a flavour of the evening. Not the flavours – you wouldn’t want that:
Anyway, these are CJ’s notes on the three wines:
A: Gasworks, glue, rotten fruit. Bent double with revulsion on first taste. Emetic. Bent double on the second taste. Repulsive. Not a bad nose.
B: Burning carpet, scorches the tongue, doesn't seem to stop. On the other hand, it doesn't make me bend double. Borderline drinkable
C: Smouldering mattress, liquorice in puddle water, makes me bend double again. Most repulsive. The horror the horror
And PK’s:
A: This had a bouquet which can only be described as disturbing, blending as it did the scent of plastic with that of an unclean bottom. It tasted terrible, a nasty flavour of artificial fruit, like a packet of sweets left for some time in a warm car door pocket.
B: Reminiscent of being on a train with brake pad problems, or breathing in fumes of burning rubber from a distant riot. This one took me to a horrible, dark place of bitterness and nastiness.
C: With a strangely caramel bouquet, I felt this one was blander than the other two, smoother, less pungent and acerbic, and therefore marginally less repulsive.
And the reveal:
A was CJ
B was Waitrose
C was PK’s
What was peculiar was our polarisation. None of the three was actually enjoyable, but that which one of us hated most, the other hated least. So awarding points on a 3,2 and 1 basis, each of the wines ended up scoring 4.
Basically, they were all terrible. Which, worryingly, puts us on a level playing field with Waitrose…
Home Brew: The Aftermath
Home Brew III
17th January 2019
CJ 
So
the new year is upon us and it really is time to get this DIY wine
thing going. I discuss it with PK. I say that we should each get a
home wine making kit and attempt our own separate concoctions.
He
doesn't demur,
so
I
go on, more confidently, Who
should
do
what sort
of wine? Should we each try a different brew, for the sake of
variety? Or should we both do the same one, in order to make a proper
comparison? Mm, he says, staring out of the window. Naturally I
reckon I can make a better under-the-stairs beverage than PK and
secretly play out scenes in my head in which we cautiously sip our
makings and he nods, surprised, slightly aggrieved, and says, Well
yours isn't bad, at which I preen and say, It's nothing special,
you've either got it or you haven't, we can't all be gifted that way.
Well
why don't we both make the same wine and see whose is better? he says,
at last. Right.
I will start looking for wine kits.
He
then adds, Won't
we need demijohns and tubes and other such things, in order to do it?
Mm, I say. Good point. I have actually forgotten about this aspect of
the process. All I have been thinking about is a box of powders and
an instruction manual, having marginalised somewhere the actual
physical plant needed. That's going to up the costs, I say, at least
until we start making our wine in quantity, at which point we can
amortise the layout on glassware, bungs and specialist tubing. He
says, What?
I
go looking on the internet. I have no idea which retailer to
go for. The Home Brew Shop looks alarmingly businesslike, with its
five gallon wine kits and just about everything under the sun for
making wine, beer, cider, liqueurs and spirits. It is dizzyingly
polymorphous.
Brew has a tidier punters' interface, but is every bit as
overwhelming when you get down to the fine print. Lovebrewing I like
the look of not least because it directs you straight to the Wine
Equipment Starter Packs, with the basic pack (two one gallon
demijohns, a hydrometer, thermometer, siphon and
DVD)
at a very reasonable £22.00. Art of Brewing clearly has everything I
could want, but again, is daunting in its profusion of
opportunities,
like a provincial junk shop.
The appealingly-named Beaverdale also looks tremendously purposeful,
but again, perhaps too full-on for a half-arsed dilettante to feel really comfortable with.
At
any rate,
I think I can see where to go
for the basic infrastructure. Which still leaves me with the question
of which wine to attempt to make. Why do I think that red would be a
safer choice? For some reason I assume that a red, being inherently
more flavoursome, ought to be more idiot-proof. It has more options.
It is more robust.
Also I still have memories of my Pa-in-Law's home-made white, made
with the pungent little vines from his greenhouse plus all the dirt
and tendrils
and insects that he couldn't be bothered to separate from the grapes
themselves. It was a tough beverage to get outside. Yet on TheHomeBrew Forum I find some discussion to the effect that, actually,
it's harder to make a drinkable red than white. Maybe flavoursome
is just another way of saying complex
and complexity is my enemy.
Therefore:
back to Lovebrewing - pick up the necessary hardware and elect a
beverage. What do you know? They'll sell me a Beaverdale pack
straight off - and at £12.49 (special offer) for a six bottle
Beaverdale Chardonnay kit, how can I fail? That or maybe a Belvino
California White kit, which apparently makes thirty bottles for only
£16.95 - except I don't have thirty used wine bottles to put all
this bounty in, so back to Beaverdale, recklessly scorning the advice
that litters the internet, to the effect that the more you pay for
your wine kit, the better the resulting wine.
Or
Wilko, for God's sake, who first inspired in me (see pic) the desire
to do this thing, down in the barren extremities of south-west Wales,
where the rocks gleam in the rain and the sheep debate among
themselves the correct form Brexit should take. Wilko, of
course,
who seem to be offering a twelve bottle starter kit with everything
you need plus a choice
of wines - a Cabernet Sauvignon and
a Chardonnay, all for £35.00. I take a deep breath. It's the Wilko
box. I'm going to put it to PK. I'm excited, to be perfectly frank.
Home Brew IV
31st January 2019
CJ 
So
the kit has arrived. Not the gear I was originally toying with, but -
following a discussion with PK - a starter pack from Lovebrewing,
containing a Beaverdale Cabernet Shiraz ingredients box as well as a
couple of demijohns, a siphon, a thermometer, hydrometer, all sorts.
And he's acquired the same set, too, so that we can both attempt the
same muck and compare our results.The tension is palpable.
Slightly
moreso when I get round to watching the DVD which comes included.
In this, an affable bloke called Richard stands at his kitchen sink
and tells you how to make your own wine. Fair enough, except that his
starter pack contains one enormous plastic bucket instead of two
plastic demijohns; and he's bustling through the techniques required
as if he's late for a train.
I have difficulty keeping up.
I sit there wondering whether to use the hideous old bucket in the
laundry room to make wine in - and is there any way I can get it
clean enough - as he flings materials and tapwater around on screen.
Then I realise that his washing machine is in camera
shot
and that it contains some laundry. I become transfixed by this,
trying to decide what's actually in the wash. Bedding, I reckon after
a while, or towels. Finally I settle for bedding, at which point he's
already tearing open sachets of yeast and additives as fast as his
hands will let him and I realise that, just as in chemistry classes
at school, I have strayed intellectually,
could not tell anyone what I have witnessed
and consequently
have no faith
that when I try the experiment it will come out anything like it's
meant to.
The
good news is that Beverdale tell you what to do on a single sheet of
pink paper packed
with the plastic bladder of concentrated grape juice that is their
stock-in-trade. This is more like it. I sterilise my gear, failing to
use warm water, with the result that my hands are blocks of ice by
the time everything's clean. I then admix grape juice and tap water
in a demijohn, add some kind of ground-up oak powder for that fine
oaky flavour at the end, chuck in the yeast, agitate, examine the
resulting purple treacly foam with the hydrometer (bang on 1080, two
successive readings). It smells a tiny bit rank, so I seal it up
with an airlock and stand back. For some reason I am now mournful
that it all should have taken so little time.
Of
course, it's not over. There's a lot of jaunty chat from DVD Richard
about the right temperature at which to ferment your brew. It is
alarmingly high: 23ºC is acceptable for much of the time. We are in
the middle of the
coldest
snap
of the winter
and anyway, our house tops out at 21.5º during the day, before
dropping off noticeably at night. Richard (who's wearing a T shirt, I
mean it's clearly high summer at the time of filming) suggests
various ways to keep your brew up to temperature, among them an
electric thermal belt to wrap around the bucket/demijohn,
a electric hot platform and
an immersion heater. He also mentions cladding the thing in a
blanket, which is what I go for - a blanket of bubblewrap, the stuff
the demijohn was packed in, a nice symmetry,
no extra cost
and better for the planet, I factitiously assume.
So there
it is, in the shower at the top of the house where the air is
warmest. If the demijohn explodes for any reason, the wreckage will
be contained by the shower itself. There's also a heated towel rail
nearby to keep things toasty. The demijohn is swathed from top to toe
in bubblewrap. It looks oddly vulnerable on the floor of the shower.
I leave the thermometer on top of the bubblewrap to let my wine know
that I care. 21º it's saying, which I can live with. There are one
or two lethargic
bloops of gas coming up. The longer the fermentation takes,
supposedly, the better the wine. At this rate, I will be bottling at
some point in 2021. But you know what? PK hasn't even started.
Gentleman Winemaker Me
7th February 2019
PK
For some reason, I have gone along with CJ’s crackpot idea of making our own wines. It is one thing for him to try and emulate or even better the bottom-shelf bargain wines that he buys; quite another for me to try and echo the classier products that I pursue.
But then I considered the respect I have for the makers of my wines. Perhaps becoming a winemaker, albeit a modest one, could be a means of claiming first-name terms with the likes of “fellow winemaker” (as I could rightfully call him) Eric. Or with Aubert at the Domaine de la Romanée Conti. I might acquire the urbanity of someone like Leoville-Barton’s distinguished Anthony Barton. I certainly echo his philosophy that “I don’t make investment wines”. No indeed, not in my kitchen.
I had kept quiet at home about this mad plan of CJ’s, and hidden the equipment, and a hoard of my empty bottles, in the cellar,. I anticipated an unfavourable reaction from Mrs K to the idea of liquids fermenting around the house (or, as I must begin to call it, the proprieté). She did, it emerged, wonder why our recycling had been uncharacteristically light on bottles. But she seemed remarkably relaxed when I broached the plan, her first and only real anxiety being that she might have to taste the results.
And so it begins, although I remain disdainful of CJ’s use of the term “Home Brew”, just as I am troubled by purchasing wine-making equipment from a company called Lovebrewing. This is vinification, surely,
I, too, watch the briskly enthusiastic brewlover Richard making wine in his t-shirt and jeans. He does not reflect my vision of an urbane gentleman winemaker. He sports a t-shirt from an outdoor apparel company, and stubble unrelated to a designer. Unlike CJ I do not become fixated by the contents of his washing machine, but I do notice that the on-screen caption suggests he is “sterlising” (sic), an attention to detail on my part which I hope will prove beneficial.
For I am nothing if not a stickler for detail when it comes to recipes. I am indeed (as I explained to Julian Barnes when he gave us our André Simon Award, a Pedant In The Kitchen. So I am concerned that the airlock I have been sent has a yellow cap, and not, as referred to in the accompanying instructions, red. This is the kind of thing which can lead to disaster.
Anyway, I plump for making cabernet sauvignon, as close as I can get to my beloved claret. With increasing confidence I wield the likes of hydrometer and airlock. I sterilise, and mix, and test. (Well, do you know the exact temperature of the hot water from your tap? Well, do you?) I mix in oak chips, because I’m short on barrels.
And finally I have a demijohn of foaming liquid, coloured a threatening purple, which I stash carefully away. I have somewhat gratifying stains of grape juice on my hands, although before Mrs K returns I carefully clean the somewhat less gratifying stains of grape juice off the kitchen surfaces.
I managed to persuade Mrs K to allow the wine to ferment in the currently warmest place in the house, where we dry our laundry – but in order to protect the surroundings, I must keep my demijohn inside a binliner, inside a bucket. Is that really necessary? Well, the instructions say that if fermentation becomes “quite lively”, then “liquid can be forced out of the airlock and end up decorating your floor and walls!”. Not a situation Eric probably had to deal with – or worse, explain to his wife.
Now, the waiting begins. But at least there is one aspect of this where I feel I may have gained ground over CJ. I have come up with a suitable name for my wine (no, no, you’ll have to wait) and have begun designing an appropriate label. This at least may have the sophistication, the style, which I aim for in the wines that I enjoy. Whether the wine itself will live up to that, time will tell.
Gentleman Winemaker II
7th March 2019
PK
Of all the descriptions applied there to Baron Rothschild, the only one which applies to me is “slightly rumpled”. Or, sometimes, “clad”.
Yet my progress towards becoming, like the Baron, a gentleman winemaker, moves on. For weeks of fermentation, my involvement in this home winemaking carry-on has been limited to mere observation. And this I could pursue in a gentlemanly manner, sometimes clad, and sometimes even in slightly rumpled attire.
There was little to report during this time, apart from a warm, yeasty smell, an occasional gurgle and, as the demijohn was sitting safely inside one of them, a critical shortage of buckets when it came to washing the car. I mean, how many buckets does the average householder possess?
But the time then arrived for the next stage of actual activity, in which the fermented wine has to be siphoned off its lees in demijohn 1 and into demijohn 2. This involves a sort of Professor Branestawm set-up, all of which has to be “sterlised” (sic). And to keep a certain other member of the household happy, I had to do it in the bath, in case there was any kind of spillage. Or, indeed, any remaining notion of sophistication.
Thanks to my Easy Start siphon, the “wine” (as perhaps I can now call it) surged through the tube. The key thing here was to banish from my mind the recurrent images of someone on the TV having a colonic.
The wine then had to be agitated at least three times a day for three to four days. Well, I tried telling it that Liverpool might win the Premier League, a notion which agitates me a lot, but it seemed that wasn’t sufficient. No, I had to hoist the demijohn up and physically shake it, the instructions say “for 3 or 4 minutes”. Do you realise how long that actually is? I mean, Bez or Baz or Bozo, whatever his name was, looked pretty knackered after shaking maracas on a three-minute single, and he was better fuelled than me. I’m really not up to hefting 4.5 kilos of wine around for 4 minutes at a time. I presume that Baron Rothschild has a machine to do this for him. Or a peasant.
So I decided that “3 or 4 minutes” was a euphemism, as in “I’ll savour this wine in my mouth for 3 or 4 minutes before I swallow it”.
I shan’t baffle you with the technical terms used by those of us in the winemaking game, but a sequence follows over several days of adding stuff, shaking, waiting, then repeating. In the end, you add some more stuff, which is clearly both non-vegan and non-natural and fine by me. Then “shake for ten seconds to mix, and replace cap.” What, you shake it for ten seconds without a cap? Are they mad? Never mind a demijohn of red wine, I wouldn’t do that with a recalcitrant ketchup bottle.
The next stage, bottling, will be pursued in about a week, “when the wine is clear”. Frankly, I may have no idea whether it is clear or not, because it is red. If it goes literally clear, something has gone horribly wrong. Or I have succeeded in turning wine into water.
A Gentleman Winemaker's Wine
4th April 2019
PK
Yes, having made my own wine over the last eight weeks, it has now been bottled and, as you can see, named and labelled. I have a degree of smug self-satisfaction at having thought of its name, and designed a label, with the added suspicion that CJ will not have bothered with either.
(I was of course worried about emulating those hideous phonetic names drawn from initials, like PeeKay, or SeeJay, which reek of rundown shopfronts and County Court Judgments. But I feel that Piqué offers a more… sophisticated approach.)
Love my house as I do, not even I could call it a chateau. But I can genuinely state that Piqué was indeed mis en bouteille àu propriété. Which also looks better on the label than mis en bouteille dans la salle de bain.
Like so many aspects of this winemaking saga, bottling proved more challenging than I had anticipated. For one thing, when you siphon wine out of a demijohn, the hose swings around like an angry snake, spewing red wine all over the option. You’re trying to simultaneously tilt the demijohn, keep the hose inside a bottle, and pump the, er, pump. I clearly lack that key requirement of a wine bottler – three hands.
Then there was the issue of the sediment. This sat in a corner of the demijohn, an ominous slurry. It proved impossible to reach the last half-bottle or so of wine in the demijohn without sucking the sediment up, so eventually I improvised a filter, using a funnel and a tea strainer. It’s a little trick I would like to say I picked up from the Baron de Rothschild, except that I didn’t.
Somehow, at the end of it all, I had five bottles of wine. Not six, but five. CJ reports exactly the same; we each started with 4.5 litres, but ended up with only five bottles, 3.75 litres. Could all of that have gone in sediment, or even evaporation? The part des anges? I can’t believe that angels would sink to the level of sharing this stuff, even those bored with occupying the head of a pin,
Labelling added a whole new and challenging aspect to the bottling process: in particular, removing the existing labels from a week’s worth – sorry, a fortnight’s worth, hem hem – of emptied bottles. Like stamps and matchbox labels, it was once simple to soak off wine labels in warm water. That was before self-adhesion entered the process. A word from the wise (well, from me); put hot water inside the bottle, which can melt the adhesive on the back of the label.
The label still may not come off in one piece; if it does, you are likely to have a label which remains furiously self-adhesive. And if it does not adhere to self, it may well adhere to anything on which you place it. Another word from the wise (after the event): if there is one thing from which it is harder to remove a self-adhesive label than a bottle, that thing is a table.
But finally, the job was done. Piqué has been bottled in dark shouldered claret bottles, dark sloping Burgundy bottles and pale green screwcap bottles more commonly associated with white wines. This could either be a maneouvre in order to test the market, or a reflection of the variety of wines I was drinking when I needed some empty bottles.
And now it is “maturing”. The bottles are still inside a bucket, in case of explosion, although I have hopefully got beyond that stage. The final chapter will be a comparative tasting against CJ’s efforts. All I can now anticipate is that mine will possibly look better.
The Great SEDIMENT Wine Tasting
2nd May 2019
PK
It was time to taste our home-made wines, the culmination of a project which CJ finally steered us into some three months ago . The equipment had been bought, the technology mastered, the wines made, bottled and matured (and, in one case at least, labelled). We had avoided potential spillages, floods and fermentation explosions. Now for the dangerous bit.
There were three wines on the night. There was Piqué, created of course by myself, PK; there was a wine garishly labelled Lobo e Falcao, a label which Mrs K mistakenly believed that CJ had created himself, until it was explained that he had, typically, just reused an old empty bottle; and, as a control, there was a “professional” bottle, of Waitrose Soft Chilean red, which is CJ’s £4.99 staple.
Sadly we were unable to replicate the tastings of homemade wine which appear widely on YouTube. Those seem to go quite well, and nearly always end with someone raising their glass and saying something like, “Y’know, it’s really not bad at all!” However, we simply couldn’t go along with two of their common aspects, which are that most of them seem to be conducted by chaps in (a) cheaply equipped utility rooms, and (b) shorts.
Our own tasting was conducted blind, in which we were ably assisted by our spouses; while we waited outside the room, the wines were poured into glasses A, B and C by our lovely assistants (© Debbie McGee). This 30-second audio clip will introduce you to some sounds rarely heard at formal wine tastings, and give you a flavour of the evening. Not the flavours – you wouldn’t want that:
Anyway, these are CJ’s notes on the three wines:
A: Gasworks, glue, rotten fruit. Bent double with revulsion on first taste. Emetic. Bent double on the second taste. Repulsive. Not a bad nose.
B: Burning carpet, scorches the tongue, doesn't seem to stop. On the other hand, it doesn't make me bend double. Borderline drinkable
C: Smouldering mattress, liquorice in puddle water, makes me bend double again. Most repulsive. The horror the horror
And PK’s:
A: This had a bouquet which can only be described as disturbing, blending as it did the scent of plastic with that of an unclean bottom. It tasted terrible, a nasty flavour of artificial fruit, like a packet of sweets left for some time in a warm car door pocket.
B: Reminiscent of being on a train with brake pad problems, or breathing in fumes of burning rubber from a distant riot. This one took me to a horrible, dark place of bitterness and nastiness.
C: With a strangely caramel bouquet, I felt this one was blander than the other two, smoother, less pungent and acerbic, and therefore marginally less repulsive.
And the reveal:
A was CJ
B was Waitrose
C was PK’s
What was peculiar was our polarisation. None of the three was actually enjoyable, but that which one of us hated most, the other hated least. So awarding points on a 3,2 and 1 basis, each of the wines ended up scoring 4.
Basically, they were all terrible. Which, worryingly, puts us on a level playing field with Waitrose…
Home Brew: The Aftermath
9th May 2019CJ
So
now the dust has settled
and our dreams have come to nothing,
what have we learned? Almost nothing, 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.
So
now the dust has settled
and our dreams have come to nothing,
what have we learned? Almost nothing, 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
– – –