Recent content by garymc

I used some Nomacorcs once. Don't remember much about them except they were easy to get out of the bottle. I've made wine 12 years, over 3,000 bottles all with regular corks except the one batch of Normacorcs and never had a cork failure. I use natural, dual disk, and some agglomerated. The...

Do you get much herbicide drift being that close to row crops?

Poke. P O K E. Jeez. I eat the young, tender springtime leaves properly prepared by boiling and draining twice. But the rest of the plant is poisonous, especially the berries.

You started at 1.085 and are down to .990. That's probably the end of the road. If you started at 1.100 or 1.110, you could expect to go below .990 if your yeast could tolerate that much alcohol. Starting with more sugar means you end with more alcohol if it completes, thus the specific gravity...

In addition to what Scooter said, I have added fruit (elderberries) to Vintners Harvest Elderberry concentrate. This is a pure elderberry product. The instructions say it will make a 3 or 5 gallon batch. I went for 5 gallons with the addition of a few pounds of elderberries. So, yes, you can add...

The 96 ounce can makes 3 gallons of full bodied wine or 5 gallons of "refreshing summer wine" or some such. Just make sure you're getting Vintner's Harvest and not Vintner's Best. Harvest is just the named fruit and Best has other fruit juices. But you can do some clicking and read the...

That's the question. I don't think different varieties of blackberry is realistic. I think you hit it with apple, pear, and I would add Thompson seedless grape juice as likely ingredients. Somebody needs to venture into the "create a bulk account" domain to find out. One thing I noticed about...

If you're talking to me, I peeled and removed the seeds, froze the pulp in ziploc bags, then thawed it, then poured the hot banana sauce on it.

I have 4 producing pawpaw trees in my back yard. 75 percent of my pawpaws this year came from the oldest tree. I'm expecting a lot more next year as production ramps up on the other 3. I've eaten a few pounds this season, put a little into pawpaw nut bread, icecream, have another 10 pounds or so...

This is my first pawpaw wine attempt. I've been casting about looking for ways to use the pawpaws from my 4 producing trees. Maybe wine isn't one of them. So far, ice cream is the best thing I've found. I haven't dumped it yet. I put an unvented lid on the bucket and put the bucket in a bathtub...

I started a banana/pawpaw/mango wine on the 19th of October. I peeled and simmered 15 pounds of ripe bananas and poured the hot banana sauce over 10 pounds of pawpaw pulp in a 5 gallon paint straining bag. I added 2 quarts of mango nectar, a quart of spring water, 2 tsp pectic enzyme, 4 tsp...

Can someone tell me what a "water wine" is?

Are you talking about a gallon of wine or some 5 gallon batches with 12 pounds per 5 gallons? I would go toward the heavier end of the range with at least 2.5. Other recipes show 3.5 pounds per gallon. You might do more than one batch with a light, social wine with the lower amount and a dark...

Save those for making jelly. Less ripe muscadines will assist the jelly in jelling and jelly is so full of sugar that the tartness or harsh taste from a few green ones won't make much difference. But muscadine wine is harsh and acidic enough without having unripe fruit making it moreso.

I usually get hit with 2,4-D or dicamba in late May or early June and by the end of June my vines have recovered. This year it happened again later in the summer and they just resumed somewhat normal growth a couple of weeks ago. Some are behind in their maturation and all of them have a lot...