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Winot

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Hi all,

I am a new hobby fruit winemaker and am having a ball with this hobby. I can't believe I go down into the dusty basement under our house every day with a torch just to stare longingly at my aging secondaries, LOL. I think I am hooked, at least for the time being.

I finally got around to giving wine making a shot. As a young teenager I admired my grandfather and his homemade wines, and the "nightcap" he used to let me taste (from memory - turnip wine, parsnip wine, apricot wine and maybe orange wine), he must have made an impression as I have always wanted to try wine making at some point. I think it was around that time that a best mate and I made "rusty" ginger beer in a Scuba tank one school holidays, after the bright idea that we could just turn on the valve when required as it would be pre-pressurized. Not thinking that high pressure acidic liquid is a great solvent for many things, including rust :< Anyhow, 28 years later and I think I am using more standardized primary fermentors.

I live in Melbourne, Australia with my wife Elsa and 2 nearly grown-up 'kids', we moved here from the Philippines where I worked from 2003-2006. We live on the east side of Melbourne at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges, 40 minutes drive to the Yarra Valley wine region. Seems like a great community here and full of true dedicated addicts. See you all around - Bruce.
 
Hello from yesterday. Welcome to our corner of the world. Glad to have you here. I look forward to reading you posts. Keep us updated on your progress. Are you making fruit wines or grape wines?
 
Hi Smurfe,

Thanks for your advice on not corking screw-cap bottles !

I am making fruit wines rather than from grapes, and so far (since January) I have 2 gallons apricot, 2 gallons pineapple-orange, 2 gallons strawberry and nearly 3 gallons of blood plum (+bananas for body) in secondaries.
Have successfully run through a bentonite treatment on one of the apricots, though will likely avoid bentonite where ever possible. I will be back-sweetening my first batch sometime in the next couple weeks. And I have just ordered a pair of 0.01g-to-300g digital scales from ebay which will be very useful.
 
Welcome Bruce,
This is a great place to get advice on wine making as well as beer making. Do a search for most of your questions and feel free to post a thread if needed. Australia is one of those places I have always wanted to visit, and hope to one day.
Steve
 
Welcome, do yo recall what the turnip wine tastedlike. I would never think of aything like that but others ferment anything nd i would love to get into 1 of their houses and take a sip of all this (to me) weird wines.
 
Welcome, do yo recall what the turnip wine tastedlike. I would never think of aything like that but others ferment anything nd i would love to get into 1 of their houses and take a sip of all this (to me) weird wines.

Hi Wade,

This is going back 28-30 years now, and probably one of my first imbibes of alcohol, but the turnip wine was .... reasonably high ALC, barely medium sweetness, very subtle to non-turnip flavour (thank goodness). At the time I thought it was quite good, which I guess is saying something coming from what was an early teenage palate.

I recall also he said that a batch of parsnip wine was either taking ages to clear or ages to mature, not sure which.
 

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