In our previous episode, our hero discovered his stand-up freezer thawed out all over his carpets, defrosted fish swimming upstream in the broadloom, and the cats sitting in the basket with looks of complete innocence.

In order to salvage the many pounds of berries and rhubarb he had squirreled away he chose to make it all into fruit wine. We now return you to the story in progress.  

Once I was past the squishy carpets and the mopping, it was time to deal with all of my fruit before it had a chance to start fermenting on its own. A quick qualification though: only the berries were fruit. Rhubarb is technically a vegetable which grows a big fleshy rhizome, large triangular leaves and fleshy-but-yummy stalks, its petioles (stalks) which make great pie, crumbles, and jam and wine-it's really the only vegetable worth making wine out of, in my opinion. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I don't bother with store-bought, and grow my own instead. Below is a picture of my community garden, with a summer crop of rhubarb ready for harvest. The mound of dirt in front of it is a compost heap: rhubarb plants are notoriously greedy feeders!

I dragged all the thawed goo to my office at Winexpert (what, you don't make wine in your office? What do you do there then, work?) and got to it. Step one was (as in all winemaking) to clean and sanitise my equipment. In this case I got a 24-gallon (96 litre) primary fermenter, a spoon, and a hydrometer and test jar. Step two was to snag my winemaking notebook and jot a quick note:

Fruit wine, June 4, 2009. Rhubarb 30 lb, blueberry, raspberry, blackberry, red currants, black currants (freezer contents). Shooting for 46 litres (12 US gallons) finished, MRR kit as base, starting SG 1.075-1.085

I'm a firm believer in making plans for a batch, even if the only outcome of the process is that you get a laugh out of how far things deviated from your original ideas. My planned starting gravity was derived from two directions. First, it was a back-of-the-envelope attempt to figure out how much contribution I'd get from the fruit, how much sugar and water and how much from the wine kit I was using as a base.

Second, the one flaw I've noticed in judging fruit wines over the years has been excessively high alcohol content. I don't enjoy many grape wines above 14%, ABV, and most of those have enough guts to stand up to the alcohol. Many fruit wines have a single note from the dominant fruit, and too much alcohol can drive the balance to a point where it becomes overpowering. I like to shoot for 11-12% alcohol for some easy drinking character. 

I piled all of the fruit into the fermenter. After I snapped the picture, I realised it kind of made a yin-yang symbol in blueberries and currants, and I chose to take it as a positive omen-maybe my wine would have perfect balance!

After that I added ten pounds of sugar directly to the fruit, along with a half-teaspoon of metabisulphite, in powder form and two teaspoons of pectic enzyme. The sugar addition is a little trick: it draws the juice out of the berries and the rhubarb, softening them and pulling out flavours, all without the need to crush or moosh the fruit. The metabisulphite was there to keep wild yeast and spoilage organisms from getting a foothold, and the pectic enzyme will have a two-fold effect, helping break up the fruit and release flavours, and breaking down pectins (the stuff that makes jam stiff and thick) in the juice that could make it difficult to clear later on in the process.

After that I gave it a good stir, clapped on the lid and set it in a cool place to liquefy and release its juices and flavours, so I could go the next step: putting the whole batch together. Stay tuned!