New Adventure: Making Wine!

Hello again! It's been a while since I've posted, mostly due to a lack of adventures. But I've begun a new one with my friend Joe. We're making strawberry wine!

Tonight we bought 13 lbs of frozen strawberries, 5 gallons of water, and a bunch of different wine making chemicals which were all for sale in the liquor department of a grocery store. Then we got to work microwaving the strawberries in batches to make them soft enough to mash. My triceps received a workout, and the potato masher we used to mash the fruit seems, in Joe's words, "a little more concave." The strawberries won a small victory after all...but mostly they lost the war to my mashing skills. I laughed evilly and Joe cowered in terror as I crushed squishy chunks of red nastiness. Pouring it into the primary fermenter made an even grosser noise...kind of like diarrhea. =) I know you really want to drink it now.

The strawberries are beginning their fermentation, without the help of yeast, in a huge 5 gallon food stock pail. That's right - we are making 5 GALLONS of strawberry wine. It is currently being sterilized and breaking down into a syrup. It looks like a monster mash that should go on a shortcake. After the first ~24 hours, depending on what the gravity meter tells us (I still don't know what it tests for), the syrup will be ready to go into full swing fermentation mode with the champagne yeast. And then it will sit for a week and Joe will buy a secondary fermenter to transfer the beginning wine. After that, since we have to wait about three months to siphon the crap out, we will decide whether we want to make another kind of wine, and if so, when to start.

Any thoughts on what we should make next if the strawberry wine turns out to be a success? Anyone know other easy things to start with?