50 Gallons of Wine!

What 50 gallons look like

And by “wine” I mean “cider” and “mead.” Which is okay because, technically, cider is apple wine, and mead is honey wine. So put away your prejudices about what constitutes “wine,” lay aside your hatred of everything that is not a grape, and enjoy the awesome power of this fully operational winemaker!

Here’s a picutre of 10 5-gallon carboys in our office. This represents the sum of our latest group of cider and mead batches for 2008. Eventually, I’ll be posting my recipes for all of these batches, as well as recipes from the previous 3 years of winemaking. My notes are helter skelter, so making a WordPress template and posting them will put them in a database and force me to formalize them as well, in case others want to use the recipes.

In the picture are 4 batches of cider, 2 batches of mead, one batch of (hot) ginger melomel,¹ one batch of cranberry melomel, and one carboy (the mostly empty one) that is read to become braggot² when I must some grain tomorrow.

I really can’t express how much I love winemaking. It’s part of the creative side of me (I’m something of a Maker), along with lots of other things like writing, music, quilting, knitting, pottery, and yes, programming. I love the expression of a spirtual side in the creation of something that other people enjoy.

Scooping "sugared" honey into the must

Wine is probably one of my favorite things to make because people so often enjoy it over meals of laughter and feelings of togetherness. It’s what we end up drinking when we are eating together and sharing our lives. It’s a very positive feeling to create something like that.

It’s also just rollicking good fun to make. Here’s a picture of me scooping crystallized (also called “sugared”) honey into a measuring cup to add it to hot water so it dissolves. I get my honey from a local bee keeper, a really nice family who lives between Odell and Parkdale in the Hood River valley.

This is a 5 gallon bucket (about 60 pounds) of meadowfoam honey. I’d never actually heard of meadowfoam before this, so I’m excited to try it out. It’s a dark honey with a wonderfully strong vanilla smell.

It takes about 10-12 pounds of honey to make a dry mead. which means this 60 pounds of honey ended up making about 60 gallons of mead. The cost of the honey was about $60. Do the math. 2.5 cases of wine – roughly 30 bottles- per carboy. I have 6 carboys, making that 180 bottles of very good, dry, oaked, almost chardonnay-like mead. That’s roughly $0.33/bottle. Given our start-up costs, time, and equipment, it comes to about $1.00/bottle.

Talk about cost savings!

1. Melomel is the term for mead that has been made with fruit… I’m calling ginger a fruit [↩]
2. Braggot is mead that is made with malt, as in barley or wheat, about equal percentages of each. It’s sort of a meadish beer… or maybe a beerish mead. [↩]

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