From my father I got a vineyard in the Rostov region, there are problems with wine (sour), so I make cognac through chacha: my experience

My parents are the “old guard”. In perestroika times, when work ceased to generate income, they bought a dacha. And, in addition to the traditional vegetable garden, they planted a vineyard. Not immediately, of course, but different varieties were planted for twenty years.

Now the parents have grown old, have acquired a bouquet of diseases that no longer allow them to engage in physical labor in full force. And I inherited, among other things, my father’s recipe for making cognac.

Such a letter came to me in the mail of my subscriber Anna V. from the Rostov region.

The path to the production of cognac

Homemade wine without preservatives has its own characteristics – it is not very stable. Simply put, at any moment it can suddenly turn into vinegar. To prevent this from happening, it must either be saturated with sugar, or fortified with alcohol, or use sulfur dioxide.

But we don’t drink fortified or overly sweet wines, and sulfur dioxide is rumored to be quite toxic.

As a result, we settled on the fact that we need to try to make a product that is less demanding on storage conditions, but has all the excellent properties of wine, so that it would not be embarrassing to serve it to the table and present it as a gift. The choice fell on cognac.

What you need to make cognac based on chacha

The list is quite impressive, but don’t be alarmed:

1. Grapes – wine or wine-table varieties. At the moment, we have used different varieties (Northern Saperavi, Moldova, Kadryanka, Isabella and two more varieties donated by a neighbor and left unnamed) and did not find a significant difference in the final result.
2. Sugar. Not a prerequisite. Adding sugar during fermentation will increase the yield of the final product. In our region (Rostov region), grapes do not always ripen to the desired condition, so I personally use sugar in the manufacture of wine and cognac.
3. Dishes for fermentation of large volume, not less than 20 liters. Usually I use a glass bottle or enamelware, but the last time they were all full, I used a 50 liter plastic barrel.
4. Alcohol mashine. The volume depends on your ambitions. We have a homemade product – a thirty-liter milk flask with a thermometer, a liter jar with two fittings as a steamer, and a cooler for running water (purchased on the market).
5. Alcoholometer. Any option that will show a fortress above 30 degrees.
6. Oak barrel or oak blocks.

The cooking process

So, when everything is ready, you can start production:

1. Harvesting grapes. You need to collect as many grapes as you can process during the day. If the berries are left the next day, the oxidation process may already begin in it, which means that the chance of getting vinegar will increase. This is especially important if the integrity of the berries is violated (the grapes were damaged by wasps, birds, or burst during harvest). In this case, before processing, it still needs to be washed in cold water and the damaged berries removed.
2. Recycling. There are different options – grapes can be crushed with your feet, hands, using a press or a meat grinder with a juicer attachment (unscrew the adjusting screw completely, and do not separate the juice from the cake). I like the first and last options.
3. Pour the squeezed grapes with juice into a fermentation container, filling it no more than two-thirds (otherwise the mash may partially escape during fermentation), close the lid – tightly, but not airtight. The midge should not climb inside, the gas formed during fermentation should come out. It is possible to insert a thin long plastic tube into the barrel to help vent gas, but I usually do not do this. Leave for three to five days in a warm room.
4. After 3-5 days, try for sugar: if there is no sweetness, make syrup and add 50 g per liter of mash. Leave to roam again.
5. A month later we drive moonshine. Classically. With the separation of heads (what comes first from the moonshine) and tails (what is below 40 degrees). We dilute the resulting moonshine with distilled water to 20 degrees, filter it in any way. We distill again – with the same separation of heads and tails.
6. We dilute the resulting drink to a 50-degree fortress, pour it into an oak barrel, or into glass jars with oak bars. We remove to a dark place. We insist another two or three months.

Everything, you can bottle cognac. But before that, I add a little caramel for taste and color. To do this, melt the sugar in a saucepan until golden brown over low heat. It is important that the sugar does not burn. You need to adhere to this proportion: a tablespoon of caramel for three liters of cognac.

If the drink turned out to be very strong, then I dilute it with distilled water to 42-43 degrees.

Result

That’s all, the cognac is ready, you can take a sample. But I have experimentally found that its taste improves during storage.

I recommend drinking this drink with friends, in the fresh air and only for a good reason.

The drink differs from the store-bought one not only in taste, but also in price – after all, I bought only sugar for its production.

They say that every housewife has her own borscht, although the ingredients are basically the same. I think the same is true for cognac. Do you have your own homemade cognac recipe?