Wine Making in 1965

I reserved a book from my local library called The Secrets of Making Wine from Fruits and Berries by Leslie G Slater. When I got it, I realized it was written in 1965. It has some interesting stuff in it. Please note, Slater did not use commas for prepositional phrases, and since I am quoting, I did not add them in.

First off, Slater claims that part of the reason grape wine did not really take off in the Americas was because the native grapes were immune to a disease that the Old World grapes had never been exposed to, so they could not get the vineyards established for over 300 years, “forcing our forefathers to turn to other beverages.” In fact, the very last page of the book is about how to make a grape wine, but the book is dismissive about the topic. “Although grapes are almost exclusively used by commercial wineries for producing all their various types of wine, they from one of the most difficult of all fruits to establish a recipe that would be satisfactory for home wine makers living in different sections of the country.” It goes on to describe the acid, tannin, and sugar content of grapes, but talks about the extremes possible in these three categories. In the end, Slater says, “For making a white wine follow the directions as given for making an Apple wine… For making a colored wine follow the directions given for making a Blackberry wine…”

Another interesting topic Slater talks about is how legal it is to make wine at home. The law sounds about the same as it is today as far as quantity and use goes, but Slater says that “The law requires that before we start to make wine in our homes we must first obtain a permit. There is no charge and the procedure is simple.” I didn’t realize that one had to permit for personal use quantities, which federal legislation did away with in 1979. I wonder if this was a clog in the system, or if they found people ignored getting the permit. I would be curious as to why home wine making on a small personal scale is not required to be permitted anymore. However, just like today, distilling was illegal. Slater claims, “As many types of wines and especially those made from grains, cereals and roots contain minute quantities of the highly poisonous Fusel oil. In natural wine the quantity is so small as to be harmless, however, when concentrated by distillation it can be extremely dangerous.”

Slater later has some good advice when it comes to stretching a particular kind of wine or blending with other wines. While everyone loves strong flavored wines made from blackberries, loganberries, and elderberries, not everyone likes picking these berries. Slater suggests making a mild flavored apple wine that can be blended with the stronger flavored wines to increase the quantity without really compromising the flavor as long as the blend does not have too much apple wine added. Slater also suggests adding dry apple wine to another wine if it is too sweet to cut down on the sugar.

Shallon Winery

In Astoria, OR, there is a one man operation called Shallon Winery which I try to go to once every six months or so. It is run by Paul van der Veldt, a sort of kookie man who is up there in years but entertaining if you like wine and take your time. It drives him batty over how people are in such a rush these days, and attempting to rush him only makes him grumpy.

He will start you off with a tour of his facility. The main workshop has a mural, including one of Fort George. He will be impressed if you visit Fort George a few blocks up the hill before the tour. Also, take note of his label, the shallon plant. Again, he will be impressed if you know what it is.

After the brief tour, he will proceed with the tastings of whatever wine he has in stock. He does have one grape table wine, but he shies away from making grape wines since there are so many available coming out of the Willamette Valley that he figures he doesn’t need to add more to the market. It is this philosophy that grape wine is so easy to buy while good fruit wine is not that I’ve adapted.

Next is his dry blackberry wine made from Evergreen Blackberries. He will go on a bit about how difficult it is to find these berries due to little old ladies who picked them are dying, and kids just don’t want to do that kind of labor. Honestly, the Pacific Northwest grows Himalayan Blackberries as weeds, so it is a little bit rare to come across Evergreens.

Then comes his apple wine, followed by his peach. I tend to walk out with a bottle of both, though he will say that he is never quite sure about the peach being stable, so it should be refrigerated. I pulled out a bottle of that the other day, and it had lees in it, proving what he was saying.

He also has a cranberry whey wine, and touts the health benefits of adding whey to the wine. It is a pity that ag research centers do not have his recipe. This wine is not milky colored at all, and it is another bottle we take home. He recommends adding a little bit of 7-up to it for the bubbles, which is also excellent. I’ve never eaten it with turkey, which I imagine it would be good with, but to do so would probably mean I would have to share, and I would rather horde his wines.

Only once in all my times there has he had his lemon meringue wine, dedicated to his mother.

After tasting all those wines, he takes away your little glass and then gives you a tiny ice cream cone so that you can sample his chocolate orange wine. He’ll talk a bit about how the recipe originally had four truffles, but then he had to change to six. How the only paper worthy of labeling the bottle cost $1,000 for the labeler. He will recite stories about how indestructible this wine is though the years, and warns you not to refrigerate it, which I did. It causes the chocolate to solidify, so he suggests boiling the bottle, which I did, and the wine was saved. He also will proceed to wrap the bottle up in tissue, string, and foil, and then tell you he is selling it to you at the price of the truffles only, and that he views this wine as the pinnacle of his career, and that he can never beat this wine. It is sad because he is so old that it worries me that this defeatist attitude will not get him out of bed one day.

I’ll admit, we only have one bottle of the chocolate wine in our house compared to the others. The others are drinkers, and the chocolate wine isn’t so much. He does have a list of 25 suggested ways to consume the chocolate wine, such as on ice cream and, um, other methods.

Anyway, go check it out. He is there almost any afternoon, including major holidays. If there is a note on the door saying to call him, do it. The wine world will not know how much will be lost from the tip of Oregon when he is gone.

My First Batch

I started my first batch in early October, which I followed from The Joy of Home Winemaking by Terry A Garey. Garey, who I think is a woman, starts her reader off with a simple apple wine where she doesn’t make the reader go buy all the equipment in the world, and the primary ingredients are apple juice concentrate, fresh lemons, sugar, and wine yeast. All that is need is a pot, a gallon jug, a funnel, and some sulfite for sanitizing.

Eventually, I did go buy potential alcohol testing equipment, acid supplements to use instead of lemons, a siphon and tubing, pH testers, yeast nutrients, tannin, and some pectic enzyme along with bottles, corks, and a corker, and many more gallon jugs. I’m now on my sixth batch.

How did my first batch turn out? Well, I thought I would open up one bottle around Christmas, which would be a little over three months since I started fermenting it. However, I am aware that it probably needs another three months or longer aging. It is kind of ironic that here I am, trying to figure out if I have a knack for doing this or not, and I can’t even test my “experiments” until months later. Good thing I am organized, so taking notes is not a problem.