Making wine for the first time, everything got moldy and I had to pour it out: what went wrong

Have you ever poured ten liters of wonderful young wine down the toilet? I had to here once. To this day, I can’t forget this incident. And the loss is small – all the wine cost me the price of three kilograms of granulated sugar, but it’s still a shame.

It would be a shame here when I prepared this wine myself, waited for it to ripen, imagined in my dreams how I would arrange a tasting with relatives and friends … However, first things first.

Story from my subscriber Artem.

Why I decided to make alcohol myself

What is house wine in modern conditions? On the one hand, savings, on the other hand, confidence in its composition and absolute naturalness. Well, just curious. Room for creativity and experimentation.

But that’s not all. Always at hand is a great gift. You are a welcome guest in any company, and the glory of a cool winemaker, like circles on water, spreads around your person.

At the same time, in general, there are no difficulties. Berries, sugar, a large glass bottle, some free time – that’s all you need.

Such thoughts periodically visited me, until I realized that the time had come to put my desire into practice. He acted more on a whim and in accordance with his knowledge of the subject.

I was sure that the main thing in homemade wine is naturalness and exquisite taste. Therefore, I decided – no nutritional yeast, only wild ones, which themselves live on berries. Well, and sugar, so be it.

In our Central Russia, berries are not wine grapes for you, the sweetness in them is clearly not enough for the wine to ferment well without sugar.

My first winemaking experience

It was the end of summer, and the choice of wine material, especially one that would not cost me anything, was small.

Therefore, I settled on mountain ash – a tree in our summer cottage that year was strewn with large bright orange tassels. And here, on the farm, my parents found a delightful 20-liter bottle of dark green glass with a narrow neck.

Classic wine bottle

I will not talk in detail about how I prepared rowan wine. The most important and surprising thing is that it turned out!

Fully ripened and even brightened exactly for my birthday. Liters 10 exactly came out. It was presented to friends with great pomp as an absolutely natural and elite product.

Whoever drank young wine knows its deceit. It tastes like compote and is drunk accordingly. It seems that it is impossible to get drunk from it.

You sit like this, overturning glass after glass, and then it turns out that you can’t get up anymore. The one who most of my friends joked about the fact that the degree of wine let us down was the first one who could not get up. All in all, a resounding success.

After that, I felt like a noble winemaker. The next garden season did not miss the harvest of berries. Most of all we had blackcurrant. And her taste is just as refined as it seemed to me in my dreams of elite alcohol of my own production.

What ingredients are required

So, the berries are collected – about five kilograms. It is impossible to wash them categorically – wild yeast will be washed off, but we, on the contrary, need to propagate them.

I didn’t go through them either, I thought – and so they are selected. In a large enameled bowl, I crushed with an ordinary pulper what kind of mashed potatoes we are making, covered it with sand in an amount of 3 kilos, added a little water, about a liter.

Currant ready for wine

Cover carefully with a clean towel. Keep it out of the sun just in case. And left for a few days – let the wild yeast multiply!

The cooking process

Then he squeezed it well through several layers of gauze. I poured the resulting syrup into my 20-liter bottle, added water there to about half.

You could, of course, just put a rubber glove on the neck and pierce a small hole in your finger, but I’m a noble winemaker. I decided I would do everything right.

A suitable cork, a rubber tube passed through it, lowered into a jar of water, and the water lock is ready. It remains only to wait at least a month for the yeast to do its job.

Wine with water seal

I periodically checked the treasured bottle. Fermentation proceeded as expected, and after a little over a month I decided that it was already possible to pour the wine into containers so that it would be clarified.

What result did I get

I remove the water shutter, I start pouring. And oh God! What’s this? There is a layer of mold on top of the wine.

mold on wine

Something went wrong? I call my wife, show the mold with a tragic look, I say, they say, I’ll have to pour it out. And she let me interpret that, they say, maybe it’s not scary. Remove this layer from above and that’s it. No, I won’t risk it. It’s a pity, of course, the product and their efforts, but health is more expensive.

I drag the heavy and uncomfortable bottle into the toilet and pour it into the toilet bowl. And it, an infection, smells like this … The aroma is so … Just like elite alcohol should smell. Lew and I almost cry. Here you have a noble winemaker.

Who is to blame and what to do

And, imagine, after a while, I read somewhere that it happens like this, with mold. And at the same time, the wine is really good, you just need to carefully remove the mold.

Several years have passed since then. I didn’t make any more wine. And then suddenly they give me home-made wine that I recently knew. And what? Currant, of course.

So I think: maybe return to winemaking on a new round of understanding the issue? Fortunately, there is now a sea of ​​​​information on this topic, and support can be found in online communities.

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