Hello everyone from Ireland.
I'm a new member who has just gone back to homebrewing/winemaking after quite a long break.
I began the art many moons ago with beer kits which were drank with my student mates in England.
In Ireland I moved on to wine making kits with varying results, no disasters, a few quite reasonables but mainly ok's.
Moving to Connemara I then moved on from kits to flower wines using local gorse and elderflower. The elderflower champagne in particular turned out pretty good and i have saved one bottle for a special occasion. One time the local supermarket got a stock of lychees fruit very cheap and having found a recipe to make a german type wine using lychees and peaches the result of that was probably my best effort to date. My last wine was made in 2012. A friend had a greenhouse with a vine which wound right around the whole inside. He could not use all the fruit and said I could take enough of the red grapes to make a few bottles of wine. He doubted it would work as he had failed in the past with the wine developing off tastes. It took some careful prep but the wine turned out quite drinkable. We shared the result but I did not have enough bottles for myself so a good percentage of my share was saved in 3 demijohns. I drank my bottles of wine some time ago but inertia set in and I just left the wine in the demijohns. Finally this year i got myself motivated again and bottled the wine. Well I think its wine but after 10 years in the demijohns it tastes more like sherry than wine and I think its pretty strong. What has happened to it ?
Ps. i have just started making some hard cider with apples from our garden. The cider is still fermenting in a demijohn, but i'll let you know how it turns out when I get to bottling latter this week.
Regards,
Gearóid
I'm a new member who has just gone back to homebrewing/winemaking after quite a long break.
I began the art many moons ago with beer kits which were drank with my student mates in England.
In Ireland I moved on to wine making kits with varying results, no disasters, a few quite reasonables but mainly ok's.
Moving to Connemara I then moved on from kits to flower wines using local gorse and elderflower. The elderflower champagne in particular turned out pretty good and i have saved one bottle for a special occasion. One time the local supermarket got a stock of lychees fruit very cheap and having found a recipe to make a german type wine using lychees and peaches the result of that was probably my best effort to date. My last wine was made in 2012. A friend had a greenhouse with a vine which wound right around the whole inside. He could not use all the fruit and said I could take enough of the red grapes to make a few bottles of wine. He doubted it would work as he had failed in the past with the wine developing off tastes. It took some careful prep but the wine turned out quite drinkable. We shared the result but I did not have enough bottles for myself so a good percentage of my share was saved in 3 demijohns. I drank my bottles of wine some time ago but inertia set in and I just left the wine in the demijohns. Finally this year i got myself motivated again and bottled the wine. Well I think its wine but after 10 years in the demijohns it tastes more like sherry than wine and I think its pretty strong. What has happened to it ?
Ps. i have just started making some hard cider with apples from our garden. The cider is still fermenting in a demijohn, but i'll let you know how it turns out when I get to bottling latter this week.
Regards,
Gearóid