This weekend we were very fortunate to meet up with Darlene and Bill, the owners of Hunters Valley Winery in Perry county….just over the mountain and a little to the east of us. They were very gracious to spend a few hours explaining their winemaking, grapegrowing and history of their winery. They have been doing this for 27 years! and recently expanded to a larger winery and tasting room facility and also added a pavilion for weddings in the vineyard. We learned so much from them and really appreciated their hospitality and willingness to share their knowledge.
We also tasted some of their wines and took home a bottle of their Berry Mountain Red blended wine, which is delicious!
Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm
Wine
Spices and Herbs
Managed to get one more good cutting of herbs today, before starting to weed the herb garden:
- 2 huge bunches of peppermint
- 2 bunches of thyme
- 1 big bunch of rosemary
- 1 bunch of oregano
- 1 big bunch of sage
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| Fresh herbs hung up to dry in the kitchen |
We also made a batch of spiced apple wine – the recipe called for cloves, broken up cinnamon sticks and shredded ginger root. Can’t wait to see how this will turn out – may we’ll have it ready for next year’s Thanksgiving holiday. In the meantime, I am making do with mulled hot cider – actually sipping it right now and it is delicious!
Experimenting with Blackberry Wine Recipes
This year we decided to approach home winemaking more scientifically – not only are we writing down exact ingredients and keeping track of temperature, brix and hydrometer readings – we also keep track of how often we rack the wine, and make notes of color and taste variations throughout the process.
And we are making only small batches – but varying the recipes – for our blackberry wine. For this newest batch we just started (from our frozen berries) we are trying to reduce the amount of overall acid in the finished product. We did some research on the yeast varieties and are trying out a new one for this batch. We don’t want to change too many variables at the same time – we’ll know in about a year what worked best. This is not a hobby for the impatient, that’s for sure.
Chambourcin Progress
This evening we transferred our newly fermented Chambourcin wine into carboys. We added wood chips to one of the “batches” – we’ll see how this turns out.
The juice has amazing color and smelled delicious. Can’t wait to find out what this will taste like once it is aged enough.
First (small) Grape Harvest
We’ve been keeping a close eye on our first Chambourcin harvest. Since this is only the second year for the grape vines, we removed all grape clusters, except one, from each vine during early spring. The grapes have been growing beautifully and we’ve been testing the sugar content every couple of days. Our plan was to wait at least until Labor Day weekend….but our plans did not work out.
A huge flock of migrating black birds attacked our grape vines this morning – Jeff thinks there were thousands of them, he said they were sitting on the telephone wires as far as the eye could see, and every tree was full of them as well. They pretty much demolished our grapes…probably ate 2/3 of what we had.
So this evening, Jens came over and we picked the remaining grape clusters. We used our (sterilized) apple cider press to crush the grapes and then we manually “destemmed” them. We still ended up with about 17 gallons of “must”, which we will be fermenting. The juice tasted great through, just a bit tart, but very flavorful and fruity.
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| Everyone used buckets |
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| Got everything ready first |
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| Crushing grapes |
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| Buckets were dumped into tubs |
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| Destemming close-up |
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| Team destemming |
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| Final (twilight) clean-up |
