Fall is an exciting time at the Winery.  With last year’s wine bottled and the harvest rolling in, its onto the new vintages!  Concord grapes are one of the first varieties to be harvested.  We usually begin picking them in early September.   Our concords have already been pressed and gone through the primary fermentation.

The primary fermentation is the initial conversion of sugars in the grape juice into alcohol and carbon dioxide using yeast.  The wine is then syphoned or “racked” into the secondary container.  This racking is important.  Sediment falls out of the fermenting juice, which is primarily composed of spent yeast and grape pulp.  We don’t want the wine to rest too long on the sediment as this can impart off flavors into the final wine.  Wine typically spends 1 week in the primary fermentation.

The concord wine will rest in the secondary tank, with occasional rackings, until it is ready to be bottled.  In the meantime, we will continue to harvest, crush, and process our other varieties.

This month we began fermenting spiced pumpkin wine.  This wine is used as the base in our pumpkin wine slushy, which is reminiscent of pumpkin cheesecake, creamy and full of fall flavors.   We made our experimental batch with 90lbs of long neck pumpkins and added raisins, cinnamon sticks, cloves, nutmeg, and fresh ginger root.

The spice blend is a little different than previous years but it smells glorious and we expect to produce a small batch of wine (25 gallons) next fall.  In the mean time, stop by and check out last years pumpkin wine test batch.  It will be out in the slushy machine next month!

This month in the Winery we are fermenting mint wine.  That’s right, mint wine.  You may have tried it this past spring in the mint wine slushy.  We have also heard that a splash of mint wine in your ice tea on a warm summer evening is spectacular.  To that end, we are making enough mint wine this year to bottle.

We began by harvesting the mint and stripping the leaves from the stems.  We had 105 cups of packed mint all together.  The leaves were divided into 3 fermentation bags.

We then poured boiling water over the fermentation bags into the “big” pot (which is a little over 50 gallons) to make a strong tea.  After the bags were done steeping, we dissolved sugar into the hot mint tea.

We allowed it to cool over night before adding the apple juice and yeast.  The apple juice is there to provide nutrition for the yeast is while adding a pleasant apple wine taste. It is currently bubbling away and will ideally be bottled over winter. Look for a release around St. Patrick’s day!