How much has wine making changed over the years?

Good morning all. When you get a chance it might be worth having a look at the forum rules - the thread is getting close to one of them!

Cheers,

MM

ManseMasher said:

Good morning all. When you get a chance it might be worth having a look at the forum rules - the thread is getting close to one of them!

Cheers,

MM

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oh it is! Sorry and will read them now, didn't mean to cross any lines

Sorry

ManseMasher said:

Good morning all. When you get a chance it might be worth having a look at the forum rules - the thread is getting close to one of them!

Cheers,

MM

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oh yes, I can see where we close to the line! Please delete any post that is too close to the mark if needed.

cheers

This is actually a really interesting thread. I don't often come into the wine making forums as I don't make wine but please keep the discussion about distilling to the Laws surounding it and not how to distill

I am considering writing a book about winemaking but past experiences on writing technical stuff on specialised subjects has resulted in outdated information before completion, let alone publication. One solution is to publish an online handbook, say on Kindle, on a subscription basis with downloadable updates which replace outdated information and add new. However, forums like this already perform a similar function.

tonyhibbett said:

I am considering writing a book about winemaking but past experiences on writing technical stuff on specialised subjects has resulted in outdated information before completion, let alone publication. One solution is to publish an online handbook, say on Kindle, on a subscription basis with downloadable updates which replace outdated information and add new. However, forums like this already perform a similar function.

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first up for the mods, i have no intention of talking about distilling but about the rules on it were part of the whole of the rules of uk home brewing compared to other countrys

as for tonys quote above ,
i disagree, i believe a well written book does not age.

the books we spoke of earlier with peter duncan and jerry are as valid now as they were fourty plus years ago

they discussed the reasons why some process or action works and we still do the process even now, the discuss peter had about mixing acids was for me a profound moment as i suddenly had the lights switched on for the oldest question


why

once you know why that works the way it does the better

this is my life cycle in wine
i learnt country wines so say 3 years for an elderberry , 2 for apple and so on to keep the wine cellar stocked up we were taught tea wines and so forth as they are done in a few weeks, we were shown how to do both in that way we stocked the cellars for two years time by doing both we were cheap and cheerful and "full recipe" wines my old mentor suggested we call them silly and serious wines

tins and kits were used and were well received and wanted but the real wine making was for full recipe wines with great details to be done and held to, but i did not understand why

after five years we are doing reasonable well, i can turn out house plonk in 6 weeks with great repetition so we have quantity and quality theres a few liquors in there and so forth

but i learnt a craft and i learnt not to blindly accept a recipe as stock standard but as a starting point, every recipe i start is all ways altered to suit

the wife and i drink black tea as normal, my idea of a decent red wine would suck the life out of most people as my tanin levels are very very different to yours and most other people

i know my wife loves 1004 but hates 1006 or even worse 1002
my wife loves soft wines, herbal teas, light grapefruits, rhubarb made from red stalks to a rose wine all running around 12%

me it has to hit your taste buds like a steam train dropped from the sky

when we do big wines, first run is for me and second run the wifes and third run house plonk. i have had to take my wines outside in the winter to cool it enough to drop tartaric crystals and the fell like the snow that surrounded it

all of this was done inside the realm of a local wine circle and wine competitions, we used to drive all the way over to Banbury from where i lived and tried to compete against that local circle we went to york and so forth with our wines to compete

we did not want to win but we wanted to be taught, does anyone here really know what a real ginger wine should taste like, what level of warmth for the finish let alone the sharp starter tastes, judge know and we used to hunt them down like mad.

when i moved to brum i posted here and else where trying to hunt down a wine judge so i can send him or her samples for comment and reflection, i found a retired one eventually and we spent many years in contact before their demise


now people complain that the their worzle turbo wine takes to long to work , for petes sake people he only designed it to be used as a stop gap:rofl::rofl:

do people not realise that, or is just me? why has it suddenly become a serious wine production suggestion

kits are the same, a kit is an amazing piece of construction with thousands of hours in testing and organizational skills to reproduce a set wine, say a chabley, where as i can do the same with herbs and fruits, but everyone seams to have got as far as the kits and stopped, no one want to better them selves or to wonder why or for self improvement

i know we all have different ideas and reasons and i understand and respect that but no one seams to be that bothered anymore

i dont want to be average nor do i want to be ok or acceptable or passable

i want to be stunning or amazing or mind blowing. the last thing i ever want to be in any thing i ever do that i truly love is "OK"

but to get past average you have to break the mould and cut your own paths

say an elderberry wine, nothing special say 2kg of elderberry and a couple of kilo of apple to sweeten the tanin down a bit and soften the palet how many here do you think know that trick,

lets go further on that recipe, when i pick the elderberries i like to steam as it soffens their tanins but keeps the colour, i dont press as that adds another year on the fermentation
but i try the liquid and i test to see if its strong in this or that and add items to counter or to enhance it, a chef tastes his food as he goes along making dinner yet most wine makers wait 2 years before they try the first glass?

we were all ways suggested to test three drops every month and to make notes, in that way we know when the wine has flattened off and its time to drink it or to bottle it, but now most wish for instant results and quick pay backs,try the same recipe with four different yeasts and see what happens, i have done wine in single bottles just to see, you can change the apple types to get different results, when we pick our elderberrys we know certain bushes give bigger berries and others smaller, some sweet and some sour and we now understand which ones to avoid and which to pick and i dont need a refracter to do so

i did when i started but the people i had as a support network taught me the patience is needed , many people no learn from and "expert" on you tube or follow recipes to the letter, even if that red book has loads of miss prints and spelling mistakes,

for the thinking wine maker there is very very little printed out there for there research or use, pretty well every thing i read now is taken from research papers or from paid interviews with lab people, some good some bad. some of the yeast people i have meet are great at explaining the ideas i were looking at others were terrible at trying to explain them.

i miss the old face to face wine circles or sitting in front of the screen when we did the first ever internet based virtual wine circle, popping off to the shops the week before to find the right bottle of wine that we were going to discuss and so forth, sending samples off to get detailed reports back, i miss that and would like to see it come back but i am old fashioned and i dont think it ever will, rows of tables with hundreds of competition bottles.

did you know, every single clear glass wine bottle i ever picked up out of the glass bins was all ways looked at carefully to see if it was the next competition quality bottle of just another clear glass bottle to chuck some wine in:wha:

As a newbie to the world of wine making myself (but with lots of fond memories of helping my Grandfather as a child, foraging for whatever, and getting wildly excited when we found some!) I can't add to the value of this thread, but can say I've learnt a lot from it and its been a fascinating read too.

I've ordered the 'must' book, done some research on t'internet, my next part is to try and learn about why different yeasts react differently.

Thanks all - without the posts here I'd still be plodding on 'in the darkness'.

Now heading off out to a freebie apple tree for the last time this year - so cider making here I come!

congrats murphysmum on still doing it the non kit way

we are a very rare bunch now,

what i like to see is the difference the beer brewing has gone through rather than the wine

wine has gone from home made to kit based and new people are coming in because of the kits

where as beer has gone from kits to AG and from strength to strength as it were, two hobbies very similar and completely different methods of self fulfillment ??

what i do see is a lot of the mentoring has gone in the wine hobby and a lot of the face to face training and or showing how.
i personally have set up loads of newbies by popping round to the their houses and doing a wow with them or a tea wine if they like, and helping them along, now everyone just does YouTube to learn

i work in the construction industry and one of our biggest jokes for years has been

" i am an expert i saw the you tube video three times last night and i reckon i can do it"
we see so many people think a 3minute video circumvents 25 years of experience in an evening watching videos

but then we are back full circle of people blindly leading the blind, no one asking why and no one wondering what if

people see these videos and for what ever reason just expect that it is true/perfect/correct/sociable acceptable or within the realms of reality.

some of the horror stories i here of idiots advocating zero yeast recipes and the like or sterilising in a disk washer i think are just down right dangerous and these people should be stopped but no one can do that the internet is free for all idiots included

but for me what happens is people try, loss heart and fail and blame every one and every thing but the pratt that they saw on you tube

i see it a lot on forums to, the shouty one must be right, even though he is a complete plonker and has 2 years of fermentation behind him and i have 30, i get trolled or shouted down and so forth.

in a face to face wine circle a troll or shouty man would be either told to shut up or shown the door as his ignorance would be apparent to all to see, here in internet land its not, at an old style wine circle the one thing we were expected to do or even forced to do was to alter the information in front of us, to best suit our wines

att my oldest house all the demi johns were in the unheated garage, every week we would add and subtract demi johns and there contents, even in the winter time we would still add demijohns of wine, eventually they would fall silent as the winter cold came in, once the fist weeks fermentation was done and the top up complete, they were thrown out of the house into the garage, in the spring they would all restart and come back to life 4 months later and away they would go the rested yeast firing back into life

now we have threads on aquarium heaters and perfect fermentation temps and fridges turned to ferm cabinates and so one, as i said earlier one person here is complaining that his WOW is slowing down because its cold

has anyone mentioned its supposed too its winter time:lol::lol:

and that persons lack of training or mentoring shows with that question, does no one else stock up for Christmas any more:thumb::thumb::thumb:

we have four beer kits on the brew at home at the moment, roughly 160 bottles cleaned and scrubbed out, we do 25 each night, and leave them filled with meta sulf. next we plan to bottle the lot and to do three more kits of beer,
thats enough beer for my house house, my sons (the bulk, he's 24 and single) my daughters and my parents, how many people are going to buy 10day kits on the 14 of December and wonder why they are disappointed??

The wine and shampoo this year we will drink was started in 2013 and at the moment we have just finished the last of the 2010 apple, ( has past its best5/10) and the 2011 elderberry( reasonable6/10) as well as tea wines i have made last week. from the main of the forum pages most people are drinking wines less than 2 years old and most drink all there wines under 18months old

att my oldest house all the demi johns were in the unheated garage, every week we would add and subtract demi johns and there contents, even in the winter time we would still add demijohns of wine, eventually they would fall silent as the winter cold came in, once the fist weeks fermentation was done and the top up complete, they were thrown out of the house into the garage, in the spring they would all restart and come back to life 4 months later and away they would go the rested yeast firing back into life

now we have threads on aquarium heaters and perfect fermentation temps and fridges turned to ferm cabinates and so one, as i said earlier one person here is complaining that his WOW is slowing down because its cold

has anyone mentioned its supposed too its winter time

and that persons lack of training or mentoring shows with that question, does no one else stock up for Christmas any more

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I think we all get that you like to do things the old way and time is of no consequence to you, you appear to look down your nose at anyone who wants to speed up the beer brewing and wine making process, why does anyone who just wants to make a kit beer or wine need training or mentoring this is a hobby we all know little when we start and like when you started we pick things up as we go along, the difference now is we have youtube and the internet not all videos are rubbish take Craigtube below for example his videos have been posted on the forum numerous times.

As for your comment about the member asking why his wine is slowing down, maybe he doesn't have the 30 years of knowledge you have and neither did you when you started out.

Welcome to CraigTube

79,830 views
My channel is mainly about home brewing beer and wine, but I try to keep it fun and do a variety of things here. I play drums, sing, play guitar and cook. If you like any of these topics, I invite you to hang around for a while and give this channel a whirl. You can always unsub later if you're not happy. Welcome, and CHEERS!

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAJKWCdaPq4[/ame]

I so wish we lived closer, Elderberry, as we would jump at the chance of a wine circle, and to grab some knowledge of those with experience.

But, we shall continue with our 'little experiments', no doubt having fun, success, failure and several sticky messes to clear up!

For us, we get as much fun from the learning as we do from the drinking (well almost!!!) and each day listening to the choir of 'pluck, pluck, gurgle, pluck' going on still creates some excitement (other half thinks he's invented a clock with two airlocks sounding like tick-tock every couple of seconds!) :lol:

Now, must go chop apples and make another gallon of apple wine and some cider.

craig tube is exactly what i was on about. a self publicist tv start, now i have not watched any of his videos so i wont judge it as good or bad

what i am saying is this entertie used to be a face to face discussion held in someones house or village hall, where you can stop the process and say why are you adding this or that to this brew /or wine ferment, now you have to take what ever this or anyone else says at face value, there is no interaction or more to my point clarification to that persons thinking or methods

as for kits, nope sorry i am not anti kit in any way at all, i still use beer kits and have three on the go for christmas, i have even used the wine ones as well.

what i am anti to or "IST" as the wife calls any of my hang ups
I am anti the fact that if someone wants to increase their knowledge or skill bases or wants to learn more than a kit style wine that they have to do so via the internet and not via interpersonal interactions.

any wine club worth its salt is a walking gold mine of information skills and equipment.

several items i have had to buy over the years
50litre stainless steel cook pot, 50kg apple press with a 20t jack and wine filters, stainless steel steam extractor would have all been hired from the club for pence per weekend , i would have also been offered help if i wanted the press or the load of jars, buckets and hessian cheese clothes as well, now i have had to buy each of them just for self use,, my apple press sits in the shed buried and unloved for 11 months and 29 days of the year and is brought out for one weekends use

as a wine equipment circle this would not happen

an equipment circle is a simple affair

many people list what they own equipment wise and what is available and when and at what costs

""
say elderberry's fruit press
all steel construction and with 20t jack, blocks and boards and cheese clothes to suit plus buckets and a barrel or two, cost £10 per week inc one weekends use, can supply labour or instructions, costs 25% of what ever we are pressing

""

we all list these pieces of kit amongest our selves and say you want to rent it we meet are your house and or mine and work together

thats the culture that has gone for me and the one i miss. if you look on the beer side of this forum its full of hundreds of people making this and building that and doing so and so ready for their first brew, mine was done with wine club gear and was operated by someone else so he can explain what was happening at the time , for the first couple of years at the wine circle i never brought any demi johns as people would see/hear/find/or locate demi johns and offer them to the beginners to use, the idea was as you brought your kit you in turned offered demi johns or kit to the newbies when they joined, any new visitor left that night with a demi john full of tea wine or fruit juice wine, with the instructions of where to leave it and when to bring it back to get filtered and bottles ect

i just dont see anyone helping others , all i see is people doing there own thing and a lot of the time its done in poor fashion or under dubious ideals they have learnt from our you tube man

is that the reason kits for wine are so popular? they sell people a wine brand they know, Chablis, Rose, Merlot etc and this is what the buyers want, and because of the complexity of the kits set up they can have an instant wine in weeks or months or is it because people dont understand to ask for the kit makers to do a banana or wheat or broom so people can to learn what other styles of wine are like rather than grape variates styles

You don't see anyone helping others? Have you seen the 'how to' threads that plenty of people have given up their time and effort to produce, or the literally thousands of questions on here that get asked, and (usually) satisfactorily answered? Yes, it's the internet, not face-to-face, where would you find a village hall that would fit 15000? As for being given demijohns, not having to hunt for them, not three months ago one of our members contacted a rather newer member, without being prompted, and gave him a boiler to help him out. People have offerred to make bits and pieces and send them to people they don't know, have never met, and probably never will. Another member ordered hops in bulk, and spent a great deal of time and effort repackaging them into small taster packs so that others could try them out without having to buy 100g bags.

This is life now - people can access a wealth of information and expertise via fora such as these, and whatever search engine they prefer. If they are lucky enough to live somewhere they can access clubs, great. How many do?

And if they look at something on youtube or whatever, give it a go and it doesn't work out, at least they have had a go, by themselves, and have probably learned something along the way.

Just to back up what MM has said only today I have been offered some admiral hops for no charge and with no expectation of anything being given in return after a member saw a post of mine stating I didn't have any for a particular recipe

http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=57573&page=2 (post 13)

craig tube is exactly what i was on about. a self publicist tv start, now i have not watched any of his videos so i wont judge it as good or bad

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Maybe you should take a little time to watch some of the videos and see how the new breed of home brewers are learning how to make their Beer, wine and cider before saying they are being shown wrong, you never know you may learn a thing or two yourself.

sorry rincon

as usual here the trolls have arrived and its all started to get far far to personal, as usual on this forum people lose track of the question and just target people they dont wish to listen to, now that the trolls have taken it to me verses everyone else and are targeting me personally i wont be adding any more to this thread

Well that seems an entirely reasonable and measured reaction to the barrage of criticisms hurled at you in response to your balanced and open-minded views...

elderberry said:

sorry rincon

as usual here the trolls have arrived and its all started to get far far to personal, as usual on this forum people lose track of the question and just target people they dont wish to listen to, now that the trolls have taken it to me verses everyone else and are targeting me personally i wont be adding any more to this thread

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Personal? Targeted someone they don't want to listen to? Maybe just pointed out that times and things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. If you can't take criticism, you must have been a right bundle of laughs in your wine circle....

Oh come on, can't we all get along!

I'll pour the drinks and let's just share views, the post I started was to talk bat the way wine making has changed, and the posts make for some really good reading.

Bottom line is its all personal preference, I love the idea I can make my wines, ciders etc sometimes for practically free but foraging etc.

For me personally it's about what can I make from what I find, drinks, chutneys, jams, whatever.

But if others make from kits, go for it, makes no difference to me.

I used to make beer from kits, I moved to AG just because I liked the longer process and it gives me more freedom to experiment.

But lots of mates make from kits and we all share what we brew.

Sadly there are very few wine makers that I can find around, wish I had learnt more from my granddad.

I've found all the posts really helpful, let's all sit by the fire, pour a glass of something we have made (kit or otherwise) and chat nicely :-P

elderberry said:

sorry rincon

as usual here the trolls have arrived and its all started to get far far to personal, as usual on this forum people lose track of the question and just target people they dont wish to listen to, now that the trolls have taken it to me verses everyone else and are targeting me personally i wont be adding any more to this thread

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I think i discussed your points fairly, you dismissed Craigtubes videos as rubbish without doing the decent thing and watching any of them then call me a troll.

If you like to make "proper" wine from picked fruit and wait years before you can drink it fine, you do yourself no favours looking down your nose at other members who prefer to make kits because they are easy to make and quick to finish, we don't all have time to go out picking fruit and going through the lengthy process of making wine your way.

Rincon said:

Oh come on, can't we all get along!

I'll pour the drinks and let's just share views, the post I started was to talk bat the way wine making has changed, and the posts make for some really good reading.

Bottom line is its all personal preference, I love the idea I can make my wines, ciders etc sometimes for practically free but foraging etc.

For me personally it's about what can I make from what I find, drinks, chutneys, jams, whatever.

But if others make from kits, go for it, makes no difference to me.

I used to make beer from kits, I moved to AG just because I liked the longer process and it gives me more freedom to experiment.

But lots of mates make from kits and we all share what we brew.

Sadly there are very few wine makers that I can find around, wish I had learnt more from my granddad.

I've found all the posts really helpful, let's all sit by the fire, pour a glass of something we have made (kit or otherwise) and chat nicely :-P

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Rincon you seem to have decided that this has turned personal? Far from it. All I have posted is a different view, an opinion that challenges what someone else has said. Never inflammatory, just questioning the views of another. In the pubs I drink in, it happens every minute of every day. I find it to be one of the best ways of learning - don't just do it 'because that's the way we've always done it', ask why it's always been done that way and can it be done better? How is that personal, or not getting along? Never be afraid to ask questions, my Dad always said. It's what I tell my kids, and hopefully it's what they'll tell theirs. Elderberry might be upset by this approach, but that's his loss as far as I'm concerned. The fact is born out by his last post really.