Finalizing Bell Pepper Peach Wine for Consumption

Last December, I decided that I wanted to make something to enter into the local fair, per the suggestion of Crush It! As I had mentioned before, I was going through my freezer and realized I had bell peppers and peaches, and decided to ferment them together, and that would be what I entered.

It hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride with this project, but in the end, I did have a unique product. I don’t know if it is blue ribbon material, but I have to try and I have to start somewhere.

It finished fermenting a long time ago, and has been aging for a few months. A few weekends ago, I decided it was time to bottle, even though the peaches in it were still causing a little bit of a haze and fall out. I hope the judges don’t hold that against me.

My husband and I tried it out with three sweetnesses. The first was completely dry, which had a good body, but admittedly tasted a little off. I tried adding a little sugar, but it seemed to make things worse, so I added more sugar, and things got much better. However, to dissolve sugar in wine, you have to first boils some water to dissolve the sugar in and then add it to the wine. That added water did two things. First, it lowered an already low alcohol wine further. Second, it made the wine thinner, loosing some of that body. However, my husband and I felt that despite the lack of body, the taste was much better, and so the trade off was made.

I think if I was to make this wine again, I would definitely boost up how much alcohol would ferment.

Class: Le Nez du Vin Part II

Last night was my second and last class for “Le Nez du Vin”: The Nose of Wine, offered by my local community college “Cooking & Wine School." It is a class designed to help improve one’s ability to identify smells in wine, with last night focusing on red wines.

Our lecture for the evening was about taste. Taste and smell are different senses in the fact that our bodies are having reactions to chemicals in order to sense. Another odd thing is that 75% of tasting is actually smelling. Together, they help us identify if something is safe to consume.

Recently, there is a group of people being identified as “supertasters.” About one quarter of the population seems to have more of the smaller taste buds, making them more sensitive to tasting things. There is a simple test of consuming a harmless chemical called propylthouracil (PROP), which will taste bitter to a supertaster, while a nontaster will taste nothing. I’ve always doubted that I was a supertaster, but they said that supertasters avoid coffee because it is too bitter, which I do. Looking at the list on Wikipedia, I also avoid grapefruit juice, only consume spinach in a lettuce mixture, I don’t care for soy, and I love gin but cannot handle tonic water. Maybe supertaster explains my aversion to goat’s milk products, when others cannot tell the difference? My instructors did indicate that sometimes supertasters avoid alcohol because it “burns,” so maybe I’m not a supertaster. I’ll have to try and find PROP and find out for sure.

Back to wine – besides actually tasting wine, there is also how it feels in the mouth, which can be broken up into a few categories:

• Body – sometimes thought of as thickness. Ideally, wine should be silky, not thin.
• Temperature – consuming any food cold masks flavors. If a vendor is having you taste refrigerator cold wine, then there are flaws that they are hiding.
• Texture
• Tannin – tannins create a bit of puckering. A little bit of tannins open up the taste buds, while a lot of tannins close down the taste buds, sometimes even leaving the mouth feeling dry. Initially, tannins are short chains which are not exactly pleasant tasting. As they age, they bond to make longer chains, which taste better.
• Alcohol

Somehow, I had a wine smelling reputation from the previous week, and it kind of spooked me when a clerk came in and said I was the one to beat, and I had never seen her before. Plus, I didn’t really think I was that good as I had a list go guide me before. Well, after last week’s 14/17 correct on smelling jars, it was decided not to give us a list of what smells there were to challenge me. I still ended up with a 14/17, with one very close one of being marionberry jam (a thornless blackberry hybrid developed at OSU in 1956), and I thought it was blueberry jam. I had a little harder time with the flaws, and said one was like plant rot, but more pleasant, and he said it was actually the water drained off of a can of mushrooms, so he was trying to get us to smell fungus.

When we started drinking the wines, I had a hard time, as all of them had a black pepper nose to me, and it was difficult to get past that to smell any fruit. Maybe I’m not a supertaster.