I know most here are into beer but as some know, besides beer I grow my own vines and make wine.

One of the challenges with wine is that unlike beer, you only get one shot a year.  So the learning curve takes awhile to get through.  Years ago I got the basics down well by making non-grape fruit wines year-round, but now I focus on grape wine and am trying to perfect the varieties I have growing.

My 2011 Marachel Foch was kind of sharp (too much acid).  It has mellowed a bit with age but I learned a) I need to do malolactic fermentations on this, and b) I need more oak to round it out.  Though I think the 3-year drought we've had here has made it challenging on getting balanced grapes.

Today I did the first real taste on the 2012 Marachel Foch (well, 1/3 of it was Oberlin Noir, which is a close cousin).  The malolactic fermentation cut the sharpness somewhat, but not as much as I'd hoped.  I added more oak than last year, so I am hopeful that with some age this will be a pleasant wine.

For weeks of watering the vines to keep them and the crop alive through a 50-year drought and all the hours trimming etc, I will get ~16-17 bottles of this wine.  Ugh.

I also made a black raspberry port.  To do this legally, fortifying with Everclear was necessary.  I'm adding the oak incrementally so I don't go overboard as it took 3 years' worth of berries to make 5.5 gallons; the first iteration was light on oak so I added some more and am not awaiting the results in another couple months.  It certainly has some promise.

I have not messed with the Cayuga White yet; I will get roughly 12 gallons of this.  I plan on about 5 gallons (25 bottles) done semi-sweet the way my wife likes it, and leave the rest dry.  The dry is an easy wine; it was excellent last year and is as good or better this year.  This will be my first try back-sweetening however.  I'll get around to that in another couple weeks.

This past fall I was overwhelmed with 2X the grape crop I was expecting, so I was in oh-crap mode as I worked very late into the night trying to get the grapes processed into must.  So I didn't take pics like I did the year before.  Hopefully this year.

Wine and beer making are very different.  A batch of wine required repeated interventions for many months, and may not be bottled for a year.  I just added oak to the red wine that started in August.  I need to back-sweeten the white whenever I find 2-3 hours to work with.

Just curious, but how do you oak the wine? I assume you don't have barrels. Are you using oak chips or something like that?

Oak chips.  There are also cubes and "swirls".  Barrels are problematic and very expensive.

It's a surface area game; in the end only really sophisticated people could perhaps tell the difference.  A lot of commercial wine is not barreled.

 

Same with beer.  This is on my beer list, something I would like to do but not a high priority.  What I would do is soak oak chips in bourbon and rack the beer onto it for an extended period of time.  Probably a stout.  If I do it I will probably split a batch so I can eventually do a side by side taste test to see what it does to the beer.

That's a neat idea.

Remember it's all about surface area.  A real oak barrel does not have a lot of surface area for the volume of wood and liquid.  A chip is little volume and a lot of surface area.  As a result, it only takes 2-4 weeks to get anything out of it that you are going to get.  You don't need to let it sit for months.