I know a guy.... OK I will admit it, it was me and I had started a wine making project with my brother. We had access to tons of free fresh fruit and had started over 50 gallons all in 1 gallon batches. This was about 10 years ago. well life happened and one day added to the next and before we new it 10 years had passed and there the wine sat in 1 gallon jugs. Recently we decided to do something with it (including dumping half of it that had not lasted the ten years and bottling the rest) when I bottled my 10 year old wine I never thought to check the SG because I figured after 10 years the yeast was either dead or or it had fermented out all the sugar. low and behold one of the original gallons of raspberry (intended to have a 10% ABV) had stuck probably 9.5 years ago and bottling it was just what I needed to restart the fermentation process. (I later learned that yeast can lie dorment for 100s of years so obviously 10 years wasn't going to kill it) The wine was clear but there was a little sediment at the bottom that was creating a steady stream of bubbles. So I popped the corks on the 5 wine bottles and took a quick hygrometer reading. The results were that the wine was about 7% abv and the remaining sugar gave an sg reading comparable to a mildly sweet unfermented juice. To save what I had and try something new I transferred the wine in to 10 beer bottles and capped them so they could carbonate. Each day I popped open a bottle, only to check the carb levels. After checking I recapped the bottle and put a date on the lid. Took me 5 days to get it where I wanted it and then I pasteurized it with the technique described in the "Easy Stove-Top Pasteurizing - With Pics" thread and it worked like a champ!!!
The final result was something fantastic!!!! better than sparkling wine, better than desert wine, more refreshing than traditional wine and similar in many aspects to a cider. I am going to recreate it (minus the 10 year aging process in the middle
) using other fruits and for lack of a better name will be calling them "wine coolers" even though a store bought wine cooler is quite inferior to what I actually produced. It still makes sense to me to use the term wine cooler, as I have said in other posts, because it is sweet, carbonated and has a lower ABV than a traditional wine it is far closer to cider than wine, but the lack of apples precludes me from calling it cider, so wine cooler it is
#tag#winecoolers, hard soda, hard lemonade & more
The final result was something fantastic!!!! better than sparkling wine, better than desert wine, more refreshing than traditional wine and similar in many aspects to a cider. I am going to recreate it (minus the 10 year aging process in the middle
) using other fruits and for lack of a better name will be calling them "wine coolers" even though a store bought wine cooler is quite inferior to what I actually produced. It still makes sense to me to use the term wine cooler, as I have said in other posts, because it is sweet, carbonated and has a lower ABV than a traditional wine it is far closer to cider than wine, but the lack of apples precludes me from calling it cider, so wine cooler it is #tag#winecoolers, hard soda, hard lemonade & more
