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Make apple wine, a beginners guide to winemaking

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A lot of people ask me questions about wine making and it frustrates me that I can’t give them a specific answer. The reason is because the answers are not always the same.

Example, “how many apples or how much grapes does it take to make wine?” Or, “how much sugar do I add to my wine?” “What all equipment do I need to make wine?“

In this video, I use the leftover apple cider from our cider smash to make 3 gallons of apple/pear wine and at the same time, attempt to answer some of these questions. I also talk a little about acidity in wine, fermenting fruit and how the hydrometer can tell you how much sugar to add to your wine/must.

16 miles down Laughry Creek for my birthday

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Got a lot of great shots on my birthday day trip starting with the early morning drive over to Darian’s. The morning sunrise lit the sky in a dramatic display that I could best describe as beautiful pollution 🙂

We put into Laughry and did 16 awesome miles of some rapid moving water. I think it was running about 1.5 and it was definitely some fun water all the way down with two very small portage points from some fallen trees.

I was home by 5:30 or so to change the oil in the truck, meet the in-laws and have cake with the family. Another year down and I still believe less is more. No gifts or anything complicated, just a quick outing to air out the brain, then back to roll around with the kids and eat some wonderful wife food. Aside from thinking about an eminent vasectomy, life is good.

2009 Wine Cellar Pics

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Here’s just a little business in the wine cellar around the end of summer. All these pics were taken by my friend, Jimmy Kinker. Since I’m never in my own pics, I really dig it when he comes over and takes some pics of the goin’s on.

Jim has a new-found interest in the elderberry wine… maybe because he has access to a lot of real good ones! Together, we’ve rustled up enough berries to make a solid 10 gallons this year. Even after that, we had our “apple smash” that gave enough juice to make 20 gallons of apple wine.

As we nestle down for the winter, we can kick back and feel good that we truly harnessed the essence of the summer and fall this year, and we have the bounty to prove it.

I hope you and your family are maximizing your enjoyment of the present.

Pressing the Syrah Specter

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A visit to Dave and Sara’s made for a great food, wine and friendship experience. It’s almost as if the fall saw us coming and gave a couple beautiful days to accomplish the tasks at hand. The pressing at the Specters was a good primer for the smash at the Kinkers.

After a very organized process or pressing the Syrah and getting it under airlock, great lasagna, jalepeno poppers and couple fine Pinots were on hand! I very much enjoyed myself as I helped a friend and knocked another notch in my knowledge post

All said and done, let not the most important bit of knowledge be forgotten. There’s all kinds of ways to get the juice out of your media at hand. When you’re dealing with grapes, you gently press. When you deal with apples, you violently destroy! In both cases, the end product is something to be hailed, enjoyed and most importantly, shared.

1st Annual Apple Smash yields 47 gallons of cider

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The word for this weekend is most certainly “extraction” – that is, getting the juice from what mother nature has given us. Gently pressing, or violently smashing, it’s all good. On Saturday, I helped the Specters press their grapes in Dave’s refurbished grape press. On Sunday, we did our “1st Annual Apple Smash” using the cider press my dad refurbished but never got to use. Many years later, it finally did it’s maiden smash. Two truckloads of green, red and yellow apples, a dedicated cart, wash, cut and smash crew, and we have 47 gallons of liquid gold. Everyone took home more then enough, and I have enough left to make 20 gallons of apple wine… and 5 gallons of Apple Jack.

Thanks to Dave and Sara Specter, Mark and Tracy Webster, Libby, the kids and my wonderful wife Susan. Special thanks to the Kinkers for providing the beautiful venue, the means, and some mysteriously good coconut curry soup.

With a week of gloomy, dank, cold rainy weather a week before, and a frost the night before, it turned out to be a BEAUTIFUL day and a perfect end to a summer with a very strange crop cycle. I look forward to doing it again next year!

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AllMorgan started as a family blog to keep extended family and friends around the world apprised on what's going on at our Indiana homestead. It always been a cross between a family diary and photo … Read more

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The queen bee doesn’t decide what happens in a colony. The workers do. They adjust her feeding to make her do what the majority says. The queen can’t feed herself.