Bottling Grape and Cider

Oh no, we're down to our last carboys! Now we have to decide what to make next!

This is the final color of our grape wine. Gorgeous! It darkened up since the last time we took a look at it.
Bottles of grape wine, ready for labeling. We left it unsweetened since after a taste test we realized that it still seemed quite sweet. Also DELICIOUS. Seriously, we were very pleasantly surprised by the flavor of this booze. We've titled this batch "The Forgotten Carboy" since it sat around way longer than it was "supposed" to.

Here's what it looks like in a glass.

This is the color of the cider getting ready for bottling! Isn't it awesome? It smells and tastes like cider, which is a very good thing. We bottled a few gallons into beer bottles to carbonate until ready for drinking, then took the rest of it, sweetened it, and stuck it in wine bottles. This batch is titled "Thousand Apple Cider" since it took a ridiculously long time to prepare.

And here's the box Joe packed up for me so that I can share it with family. It's a jumble of all the wines we've got. I gave one carbonated and one sweetened cider to Dave, my fiancé; the requested bottles (and then some) to my parents; and one carbonated cider, one sweetened cider, and one grape wine to Dave's parents. Whew! Free booze sure disappears fast!

Maybe up next: Dandelion wine (dandelion heads courtesy of Dave's parents), peach wine (once peaches are in season), and something possibly involving rhubarb... This has turned into quite the project! My mom is now considering starting to make wine herself, and I'd LOVE to help her do it. I think if she wants to start this summer I'll start her off with cider since it takes such a short amount of time and I can help her with the bottling before I leave the state for graduate school in August.

Bottling Strawberry, Racking Grape and Cider

This was back on the second of April. Sorry it's taken me so long to post all of these! I'm splitting them up into three posts to sort of try and break up the information a little.

Here's the strawberry, ready for bottling! Just look at that color!This is the yeast poop from the Welch's grape after racking it for the final time. We've decided that it's the most beautiful poop we've ever seen.

This is the cider after a couple weeks. It was off to a good start! After racking, the bottom looked like yeasty apple sauce.

Bottles of strawberry wine, all corked! These are the unsweetened bottles. We kept one gallon for sweetening.

These were the labels I drew for the sweetened strawberry wine bottles. The strawberry drawn on there is extra sweet, so he wants a hug. The strawberry on the unsweetened bottles is just happy looking.

The End of Cinnamon

Well, I'm sorry to report that...there it goes. The cinnamon just never took off fermenting. So we dumped it.We tried to boil some of it down to syrup but it tasted disgusting. We decided to dump that as well. Better luck next time?

For the record: Cinnamon wine = failure!