Homemade Apple Wine

In 2010, Crystal gave me a small wine making kit as a Christmas gift.  I had been looking into making my own wine for a while, but I just never bought the proper tools to get around to it.  Now I didn't have any excuse to procrastinate any longer.

The wine kit came with a recipe book to make various types of fruit based wines (as in other types of fruits besides grapes) and my first attempt didn't go too well.  I tried making a pineapple wine but it seems that I didn't follow the simple directions too closely and I ended up dumping the juice down the drain.

Call it trial and error, but having your first batch not turn out put a damper on the whole homemade wine experience.  I put it off once again and decided to wait until the apple tree in my backyard was ready to be picked and make wine from fresh Minnesota honeycrisp apples.  

The process of extracting the juice from the apples was a lot more work than I expected, even considering that I went out and bought a juicer for the process.  I was only making one gallon of wine and to get enough juice for the fermenting process, I needed to cut and juice a total of 45 apples.

The fermenting process takes about a week before I had to transfer the juice from the fermenting pail to a glass jug to age.  The saying goes, the waiting is the hardest part, and wait you must to make wine.  This initial process was completed in the early part of November.  I finally got around to bottling it a couple of weeks ago.

The bottling process was by far the worst part of the whole experience.  Trying to syphon the wine from the glass jug to the bottles was a messy one.  That wasn't even the worst part as corking the bottles proved to be a lot harder than I imagined.

If anyone has had troubles getting a cork out of a bottle of wine should try to put a cork into the bottle in the first place.  I even had a tool that is supposed to make it easy, yet my arms and hands hurt the next day from corking the bottles.  And I only had a total of five bottles to cork!

After bottling, the wine is supposed to age for another two months before it can be ready for drinking.  When it is all said and done, it will have taken about six months from fermenting to tasting, which is a long time considering that at this point I'm still not sure if it turned out.  While bottling, I did smell the wine and it smelled like it should, so I hope it tastes just as good.

I'll be sure to post about the tasting experience.  If you're lucky you may even get a chance to sample some of it.  Until then, here are some photos of the wine.

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