continued from page 48
It is hard to match the pleasure of
serving wine that you yourself have
made. It is fun to say to a guest:
`You've had homemade challah be-
fore, but have you had homemade
wine to go with the homemade
challah?'"
Comparing the taste of homemade
wine to commercial wine, Cohen
says, is "like comparing a home-
grown tomato to one you bought at
the supermarket." He backs up that
extravagant claim with a sweet Pinot
Grigio from his own cellar.
Each year, when he sets up the
equipment in his home driveway to
process the grapes, he gets help from
a swarm of kids — his own children
and their friends.
"I wish I would have had such an
experience when I was a kid," Cohen
says.
An educator once enlisted Cohen's
help in having his fifth-grade class
make wine as a school project. The
students gained firsthand experi-
ence in the craft, starting with fresh
grapes in the fall. By spring, the
students had experienced the full
range of activities except for drink-
ing. On Purim, the finished product
went to the parents, rather than the
students, for obvious legal reasons.
THE PROCESS
For millennia, this is how our an-
cestors made wine: They left grape
juice alone to ferment. They put the
grape juice in airtight containers,
keeping it at about room tempera-
ture, and the yeast that settles on
grapes wherever they grow turned
the grape juice into wine. A few
weeks after fermentation starts, it
slows down and stops. The grape
juice has become an alcoholic bever-
age, just not one that you want to
drink yet. It looks cloudy and tastes
harsh.
Let it settle for a few months, and
you have a relatively clear beverage
floating above a precipitated mass
of lees, the sediment that settles at
the bottom. Moving the wine "off the
lees" into another container, a pro-
cess called racking, lets your wine
age without picking up bad flavors
from the lees. Rack the wine every
few months, and pretty soon you
should have a crystal clear, delicious
wine, ready to go into bottles and
ready for your table. Or not. Some-
times our ancestors came up with a
bad-tasting batch.
People made wine that way for
thousands of years. But, now, we
usually take some efforts to make
sure we end up with drinkable wine.
Start with improving the grape
juice; yeast needs sugar to make
alcohol, but many grapes do not
produce enough sugar to guarantee
a highly alcoholic and stable finished
product. Use an inexpensive little
50 August 2012
I RED TMM
Wrotslaysky siphons wine into
Wrotslaysky pours his homemade Zinfandel wine for his wife, Heidi.
bottles in his basement.
float called a hydrometer to measure tors for the home-wine market.
As with any hobby, if you get
the sugar concentration in the juice
too enthusiastic, you can spend a
so you can know how much sugar to
fortune on specialized equipment.
add; or you can ask an experienced
The good news: A prudent neophyte
winemaker for. an estimate of how
winemaker can get started with
much sugar to add, based on the
almost no expenditures for equip-
kind of grape juice you have. Euro-
ment.
pean grapes from California some-
You do have to get the juice. If you
times do not need any added sugar.
really want the full experience, go up
Next, improve the yeast: Wild
to Honeyflow Farm and pick your
yeasts add unpredictable flavors to
own grapes. You can probably pick
the wine. A foil packet of wine yeast,
70 pounds of grapes, enough for five
for less than $2, produces a predict-
or more gallons of wine, in an hour
ably good wine.
or two of not-very-demanding labor.
Then add a valve to the airtight
If you have children to entertain,
container; a little airlock valve, for
pick-your-own grapes will keep
less than $2, lets carbon dioxide
them busy and happy while teaching
escape. Yeast turns the sugar in
them where grapes come from.
grape juice into alcohol and car-
When you have the grapes, you
bon dioxide so if you do not let the
can get rid of the stems by hand and
carbon dioxide out, the gas pressure
then crush the grapes with any num-
will break your container. (Decades
ber of ad hoc instruments, like po-
ago, a thinly-corked antique crock
tato mashers. A grape crusher saves
held my first wine-making experi-
time. If you feel old- fashioned, you
ment — until the crock flew apart.
can put the grapes in a big enough
It made a mess, but the basement
container and stomp them with your
smelled wonderful for weeks.)
feet. That works.
You do not need the
When you
traditional oak barrel
RESOURCES
California Wine-Grape Co.
have crushed
or giant glass bottle
www.californiawinegrapeco.com
the grapes, you
called a carboy; soda
Adventures in Homebrewing
can put them
bottles or airtight
www.homebrewing.org
in a special-
covered plastic pails
Honeyflow Farm in Dryden
ized winepress
www.honeyflowfarm.com
will do. Put on the
Coleman's Farm Market
to separate
airlock valve and,
http://colemansproduce.com/
the juice that
after a while, you see a
you need from
bubble of carbon diox-
the grapes. If you do not have a
ide escape, making a characteristic
winepress, put the grapes in an old
gurgle as it goes. Home winemakers
pillowcase, put the pillowcase in a
have been known to sit beside their
fermentation container for extended plastic tub and pile weights on top.
For a red wine, leave the grape
periods, entranced by intermittent
skins and pits in with the juice for
gurgles.
a week or 10 days, and then trans-
START SMALL
fer only the juice to a fermenting
That's Wrotslaysky's advice. Try
container. For a white wine, discard
visiting home winemaking sites
the skins and pits right away, and
on the Internet to collect informa-
put the juice into your fermenting
tion. A physical trip to Adventures
container at the start.
in Homebrewing in Taylor or Ann
Or, you can just buy the juice.
Arbor, to the California Wine-Grape
Both the California Wine-Grape
Co. near Eastern Market or to Hon-
Co. and Adventures in Homebrew-
eyflow Farm in Dryden will put you
ing sell buckets of grape juice suit-
face-to-face with experienced men-
able for making wine. That doesn't
help if you want to make strictly
kosher wine. For kosher wine, no
one but observant Jews may handle
the grape juice from the moment it
comes out of the grape.
The California Wine-Grape Co.
has been importing wine grapes to
Michigan since the 1950s. The com-
pany imports 16 types of red grapes
and 13 types of white in season,
along with several varieties of grape
juice from Italy. You can meet expert
winemakers there and also pick up
advice and equipment. A few years
back when I bought grapes there,
someone advised me not to wash my
feet before processing them; I think
he was joking.
Honey-flow Farm has operated a
vineyard in Dryden for close to 30
years, with several different varieties
of table, jelly, juice and wine grapes
available for picking Friday through
Sunday, usually from early Septem-
ber through early October. Visit
its website for details about when
the grapes will be ripe this year. In
2011, Honeyflow Farm made their
destemmer/grape crusher avail-
able as a free additional service to
customers.
When local Concord and White
Niagara grapes get ripe, Coleman's
Farm Market in Ypsilanti sells those
in bulk at bargain prices. And,
Adventures in Home Brewing has
provided materials and equipment
for hobbyists since 1999.
So, as the nights get longer, and
summer draws to an end, you have
the chance to try the craft that
Cohen, Wrotslaysky and I enjoy, the
craft of our ancient ancestors: mak-
ing your own wine at home, in
your spare time, for fun and sav-
ings. Then, some months later, you
can casually say to your guests, "Oh,
do you like that wine? I made it
right here." RT
LOUIS FINKELMAN is a Southfield-based freelance
writer, who also teaches literature at Lawrence Tech-
nological University and adult classes for the Jewish
Welfare Federation. He loves to brew wine at home.
www.redthreadmagazine.com