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Dan’s Cellar Notes for March 2003
If you are interested in joining with other Richmond-area winemakers to form an informal club or interest group, please send me your name, phone number, and e-mail address. We will hold our first get-together at my house on Friday evening, MARCH 28th, at 7 PM. My house is in at 600 west 30th Street, in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Richmond, just east of Forest Hill Park, between Semmes Avenue and Riverside Drive. For additional information, contact me at dan.mouer@verizon.net or 804 233-2824. Please leave a message if I’m not there to answer the phone.
Are you looking for Virginia Wine Grapes???
I have recently learned of a source of V. vinifera grapes for amateur wine-makers here in Virginia. Dr. Gert Hasselhof operates Hasselhof’s Weingarten in Humble, Virginia, on he Northern Neck. Dr. Hasselhof produces about 130 tons of grapes. Besides Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and other mainstream grapes, he grows numerous less-available varieties, principally types found in Western and Central Europe. I am planning a visit to the vineyard on March 15th. If you’re interested in coming along, contact me.
Traditional Mead: a K.I.S.S. Sweeter than Wine
When Beowulf finally succeeded in slaying Grendel, the demon beast, the people of Hrothgar gathered at Herot, the Great Mead Hall, and celebrated their freedom with 40-year-old honey wine…and a fitting tribute it was!
March is a good time to make some mead. Why, you ask? Isn’t honey both fresher and cheaper in the summer? Yes, that is generally so. However, if you’re a wine-maker, you’re probably getting a bit fidgety about this time of year. It’s really too early to be racking or fussing over last Fall’s wines, especially those that need lees contact time or the first warm weeks of spring to complete malo-lactic fermentation. And it’s too early to be looking for fresh fruit to crush. Of course, there are wine kits out there waiting, but if you’ve never made mead, now’s a great time to start.
With all the fussing that can go into making wine from grapes—worrying about Ph, and TA, and SO2—mead can seem downright simple. Basically, you mix honey in water, pitch yeast, and wait! Of course, lots of folks know how to make mead complicated, too. Done well, however, basic, traditional mead is a very, very fine wine. There are many, many variations of mead which are made by adding ingredients other than honey, water and yeast—most of which have Old English (or pseudo-Old English) names, such as pyment, cyser, methyglen, and melomel. We’ll deal with those variations another day. Start with plain, traditional mead so you know what heavenly possibilities await you. Plain mead can also vary considerably, depending on what kinds of honey you use, how much you use, how much sugar the honey contains, what your water is like, which yeast you choose, and whether you finish it dry or sparkling. If you have never made mead before, I strongly recommend you begin with what I call K.I.S.S Mead—that stands for Keep It Simple Stupid!
Your first choice should be the honey. The simplest choice is to go the grocery store and buy 15 pounds of plain clover honey. I, however, prefer to buy my honey in bulk from Elwood Thompson’s grocery, and they appreciate an advanced call if you want that much honey. They usually have a light thistle honey that is perfect for K.I.S.S. Mead. Orange blossom honey works nicely, as well. At any rate avoid at this first go any darker, stronger-tasting honey, as well as honey with comb or anything containing preservatives.
There are some specialized liquid mead yeasts, but in the spirit of K.I.S.S., I recommend you buy two packets of champagne yeast (Saccharomyces bayanus). On mead-making day, begin early in the morning by boiling a couple cups of water with ¼ cup honey. When cooled to about 90 degrees or less, add the yeast and place in a sanitized jar or bottle, lightly covered, to make a starter. If you want to start this a day or two earlier, and feed it a couple times to increase your pitching rate, that’s all the better. If you want to simply sprinkle the dry yeast into the fermenter, that will probably work, too.
Warm your honey in hot water so it will pour into a clean, sanitary, stainless pot. To this add just enough water to dissolve the honey with gentle heating on the stove. Don’t boil it. Pour the honey solution into a sanitized fermenter, and bring up to 5 gallons. Tap water is fine if you filter out chlorine. Otherwise you may first want to boil, then cool, the water before adding it. If your tap water is suspect, use bottled spring water from the store. Save a bit of water to place in a small saucepan. Now add 3-5 teaspoons of wine-maker’s acid blend. If you prefer, just add ½ cup lemon juice directly to your fermenter, instead. Add 3 or 4 teaspoons of yeast nutrient; that’s diammonium phosphate, not “yeast energizer.” You could leave out the acid and the nutrient, but you will have trouble getting much of a fermentation going, and the resulting wine will be very sweet and very “flabby.” Warm the water until these are dissolved, then add to the fermenter and stir. Cover the fermenter with cloth, or with a lid and bubbler.
Mead usually ferments slowly, and it generally prefers a very warm fermentation spot. I set my winter/spring meads next to a radiator. Watch it and make sure it has started in a few days. Check on it from time to time to make sure that it has not stuck. If it sticks, make another starter, add some “yeast energizer” (also called yeast extract or yeast hulls) and wait some more. It is not unusual for primary fermentation to continue for several weeks. When you feel that fermentation has stopped, or has nearly stopped, rack into a glass carboy and fit a lock. Rack again in 3-4 months, adding about 25 ppm free SO2. Rack twice more in a year’s time, and bottle when crystal clear. If clearing is a problem, try fining with isinglass or Klaro KC. Allow mead to sit for a couple weeks after racking off finings, to make certain it doesn’t re-cloud. Filter if you like. When you are certain that there is no lingering fermentation of residual sugar, bottle the mead, and forget it for a while. It will continue to improve for at least the next year. This mead may be slightly-to-moderately sweet. More honey and different yeast will produce very sweet mead, as well as more problematic fermentations—but then we are no longer in the K.I.S.S. category.
Your mead may go through some “awkward” phases. Often mead smells and tastes diabolical when young. If you can’t seem to get rid of a sort of medicinal or chemical flavor, try adding additional acid and letting it rest. Do not be impatient with mead. Good, good things will come to those who wait.