Making Wine with Whey

Shallon Winery in Astoria, OR makes a cranberry whey wine that is really good. I had written before that he “touts the health benefits of adding whey to the wine… 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.”

This wine has been the inspiration of trying to make my own whey wine, and I have been researching and experimenting.

First off, milk sugars called lactose are not fermentable by traditional yeasts, but instead require microorganisms such as Kluveromyces lactis or Kluveromyces fragilis to convert lactose to alcohol. Therefore, powdered lactose is actually used as a sweetener in beer and wine, as the yeast will leave it alone, leaving a sweet product in the end. Lactose is not usually captured in cheese, but is left in whey. I should note, though, that it takes a lot of lactose to make it sweet.

My original theory was that a wine maker would start a batch of wine fermenting, and then add the whey later. My reasoning behind this is that the alcohol would hopefully prevent the whey from spoiling. I should admit that from my own farming days, we would keep milk for the baby calves at room temperature for a few days before it would finally start to spoil around day three. In fact, before refrigeration, people would have left it sitting out. So I know that this is possible, but I was afraid it would spoil before anything would happen. Also, would the government allow a wine maker to leave whey out at room temperature for that long? My theory was that if the whey was added in the secondary, it would possibly preserve the whey so it doesn't spoil. Another theory I had running against it was that adding acid to milk makes it curdle, and even whey curdles with acid at higher temperatures, so what would adding whey to high acid wine do to it? So many theories running though my head...

It turns out that in 1977, the Department of Food Science and Technology at the Oregon State University conducted an experiment using cheese whey to make wine. The results were published in a paper titled Utilization of Cheese Whey for Wine Production. It takes about 10 pounds of milk (1.15 gallons) to yield one pound of cheese, which means that 9 pounds is waste, or a whey by-product. The most common method used to make this whey waste profitable is to dehydrate it into powdered whey to use as a food supplement. However, the 1970s saw an energy crisis, so dehydrating whey was expensive, and they were looking for other cheaper usable methods to use whey and realized whey wine might be the answer.

So, armed with a research paper that is most definitely not a how-to, I kept some whey from three of my cheese batches, mixed it with some cranberry juice, added potassium metasulfite to get sulfur dioxide released, and some yeast. It started fermenting. Let the whey wine making experiment commence!

Different Styles of Cheeses

When it comes to classifications of cheeses, they are usually broken down into how firm they are, what kind of rind, and how they were allowed to ripen and age.

First off, the basic fundamental part of the cheese is knowing what kind of milk the cheese was made from. In Making Artisan Cheeses, Tim Smith describes cow’s milk as being the most common, with its creamy high moisture yield. Goat’s milk makes for smoother, softer cheeses than cow’s milk due to its smaller fat globules. Smith reasons that since sheep produce a smaller volume of milk than cows yet has the same total amount of solids, it makes for a denser cheese with an oil and butterfat that goes to the surface. Thing is, you can process all three milks the same way to make the same cheese, but they will all taste different.

The Cheese Companion by Judy Ridgway and updated by Sara Hill talk about cheeses in the sense of softness, rinds, cheesemaking process, and ripening process. I have supplemented some of their descriptions with information from the Cheese Primer by Steven Jenkins.

Softness

• Very Soft: 80% water and spoonable; includes most fresh cheeses
• Soft: 50-70% water and spreadable, including Brie and Camembert.
• Semi-hard: 40-50% water and sliceable with a slightly rubbery texture. Gouda is a good example.
• Semi-hard blue: crumbly or springy blue cheeses including Roquefort and Stilton
• Hard: 30-50% water and firm, perhaps slightly crumbly or dense cheese, including Cheddar, Gruyère, and Parmesan

Rinds

• White mold rinds: Cheeses which contain an outer rind of white mold that is edible. The mold is introduced either via exposure, or being sprayed on. Examples include Brie and Camembert.
• Washed rinds: a cheese that is washed in brine, wine, beer, or spirits to act as a food for bacteria, causing an orange-red rinded cheese that is soft.
• Dry Natural rinds: rinds in which the outer curds dried out. They are sometimes oiled. These rinds are not eaten. Examples include Stilton, Cheddar, and Emmental
• Organic Rinds: rinds of cheeses made from herbs or leaves.
• Artificial rinds: rinds made of ash, wax, or plastic.

Cheesemaking Process

• Fresh: Uncooked curds that are unripened or allowed to ripen only for a few days. Maybe be slightly pressed or molded, but most of the time just packed into tubs, so they are usually very moist and mild. Examples: Mascarpone and cream cheese
• Unpressed ripened cheese: Curds are cut up finely to allow whey to drain naturally. They maybe be quick-ripened with surface molds or bacteria, or slow-ripened with starter cultures for one to three months. Examples: Brie, Camembert, and Stilton
• Pressed ripened cheese: cheese that are lightly or heavily pressed before ripening for two to eighteen months. Example: Cheddar
• Cooked, Pressed, and ripened cheese: The curds are heated in the whey before drained, molded, and heavily pressed, and possibly aged for up to four years. Examples: Gouda, Parmesan, Gruyère, and Emmental
• Pasta Filata cheese: cheeses in which the curds are cooked and then kneaded and stretched before shaping. They can be eaten fresh or allowed to ripen. Examples: Mozzerella and Provolone.

Ripening Process

• Soft cheeses: ripened at lower temperatures from the outside in quickly, such as mold rind. They tend to be semisoft.
• Washed rind: a cheese that is washed in brine, wine, beer, or spirits to act as a food for bacteria, causing an orange-red rind cheese that is soft.
• Natural-rind cheeses: self-formed rinds; no microflora or molds and no washing are used to create their thin exteriors. They are denser in texture than other cheeses and usually aged longer.
• Blue cheese: a cheese that has been pierced with metal skewers to introduce oxygen into the interior of the cheese, which causes it to mold.
• Hard cheeses: ripened at higher temperatures from the inside out slowly. They may be covered in oil or rapped in bandages.

Additional Readings:

• Artisanal Premium cheese – Cheese Types
  
• Laura Werling – Understanding Cheese: The Eight Basic Styles of Cheese
• Laura Werling – Understanding Cheese: Cheeses by Category