House Wine

(UPDATE: Make your own wine at your own risk. Since I wrote up these recipes, I've had a chance to sample some of my vintages (I'm still hoping I didn't do irreparable damage to my plumbing), and only the fig wine worked out. I thought to leave the whole lot down near the park with a complimentary corkscrew for the local sans-maison crew, but couldn't bring myself to do it.)

I've made three kinds of wine at home, carrot wine, fig wine and apple wine. I'll give you the recipes with a forewarning that I don't know how any of them taste, except for the bit I sipped out of the siphon hose when I was bottling.

All fine wines should be allowed to age in a climate controlled atmosphere. So, in lieu of a wine cellar, I bottled everything and put it in a big steamer chest in the living room.

Everything I know about winemaking I learned from a book called "How to Make Wine in Your Own Kitchen," by Mettja C. Roate, published 1963. Good luck finding this book. Mine is a paperback from a thrift store, but it's definitely the authoritative book for me. There are a lot of good books on how to make homemade beer, but the ones on winemaking start reading like chemistry textbooks written for snobs. This Roate book goes straight to household ingredients, advises you to "sprinkle yeast on a piece of bread and float it face-down in the wine." She only briefly touches on sterilization, makes no mention of tannins or acidity or pH balances and all that. For her, you take anything in the kitchen that will ferment, add a bunch of raisins and let it sit "in a warm place" for two weeks.

She's got recipes for wines made from everything: dandelions, potatos, corn (dried), turnips, rhubarb, peach, berries, etc. (In fact, the guy who just bought my boat mentioned that, as a boy in England, they used to make wine from beef broth or something. Even a dabbler such as I could feel a faint gag reflex thinking about that one. I imagined a kind of fermented soup, poured cold and lumpy into waiting glasses)

The recipes seem to work, so far. In the beginning I used special wine yeast and corn sugar, both of which produce better products, but then I just started using cane sugar (make sure it says "cane") and some yeast I found on the shelf, unrefrigerated and way past the expiration date. Whatever. It worked.

The trick in most of these wines is the addition of a bunch of raisins. The raisins are what really makes it wine. In fact, I imagine if you had a food processor that could grind up raisins by the pound, you could probably whip out some decent wine in record time.

How does it taste? Don't know -- I'm waiting for it to age, I just said. Anyway, here are some recipes I adapted from Roate.

Carrot Wine

Before I bottled this one it tasted kind of like a wine cooler with a bit of Mountain Dew-like citrus and a kind of carrot sweetness that you probably wouldn't be able to identify as such. It's a a few shades past golden. (UPDATE: This wine is FOUL!! It left ungodly sediment and was so god-awful I just about took down this recipe. Or at least renamed it "Carrotsene."

Ingredients

• A couple gallons of bottled spring water

• 6 pounds of carrots

• 6 oranges

• 4 lemons

• 4 cups of raisins

• 16 cups of cane sugar

• 8 whole peppercorns

• a package (tablespoon or two?) of yeast

1. Grate all the carrots unpeeled. By hand this is brutal, but I did it.

2. Cut the lemons and oranges into slivers

3. Cut the raisins up fine. If you've never cut raisins up before, have fun. I used a meat cleaver.

4. Boil the carrots for about 45 minutes. Set aside to cool to lukewarm.

5. Strain everything through a jelly bag, cheesecloth, or through a fine mesh strainer. Whatever.

6. Put the carrots aside and figure out some alternate use for them (P.S. the flavor is mostly boiled out).

7. Stir in all the sugar until it's dissolved.

8. Put in the oranges, lemons and peppercorns.

9. Sprinkle yeast over the top.

10. Cover the pot and put it in a "warm place" for two weeks (I just left it on the back burner, where it was out of the way and warmed a bit from the pilot light).

11. Stir it every day. It will be fizzing and whatnot.

12. After two weeks, strain it again and squeeze the juicy goodness out with a cheesecloth.

13. Put it back for two more days.

14. Bottle it.

15. Keep it in a cool, dark place for 6 months.

Fig Wine

Wow -- before bottling this one was kind of a rich deep red with a definite fig overtone. I think it'll probably be like a potent cabernet with hints of a desert oasis and the sweet sweat of the camel rider.

This one will be sitting in its "warm place" for a month before bottling.

Ingredients:

• A couple gallons of bottled spring water

• About 8 pounds of dried figs

• 6-8 cups of raisins

• 12 cups of cane sugar

• a package (tablespoon or two?) of yeast

1. Cut the figs up real small. This is only slightly easier than cutting up raisins.

2. Cut up the raisins.

3. Put all this in as much water as will cover it well, then leave it overnight to rehydrate.

4. The next day, heat up the rest of the water with the sugar. While it's still hot, pour it into your soaking fig/raisin bath.

5. Cover the pot and put it in a warm place for two weeks. Like your back burner with the lid on the pot.

6. Stir it well every day. I found that it was really soupy, so maybe add more water if your pot's big enough.

7. After two weeks, drain it, squeeze the goodness out of the figs and raisins (which now look like grapes), and do whatever you want with the leftovers.

8. Put your yeast over the top of the soon-to-be wine and let it percolate for TWO MORE WEEKS -- without disturbing it this time.

9. Okay, it's ready for bottling.

10. Let it sit in a cool, dark place for at least six months.