Tannin

Tannin is found in grapes and apples, and it is similar to acid as it makes you pucker, but it is not an acid and does not affect the pH if more tannin is added. Tannins are sometimes described as the bitter tang and astringency to cider.

Tannin is particularly found in red wines because the tannin is present in the skins, which are not removed until the wine is done fermenting, unlike white wines were the skins are removed when pressed. Some regional ciders are low in tannins, while some mass produced ciders just use whatever apples they can get their hands on have very little tannins. The question of if tannins are a good thing or a bad thing really depend on the taster.

Brew supply stores sell grape tannin as a powder. I use it for fruit wines that probably don’t have much tannin, though others may use raisins to both sweeten their wine and add tannin. Other plant that have tannin include tea, elderberry, cranberries, strawberries, blueberries, pomegranates, persimmons, nuts that can be consumed raw, acorns, some beers, cloves, tarragon, cumin, thyme, vanilla, cinnamon, and most legumes.

Unfortunately, there is no simple way to test for tannins like there is for pH, as it a complicated lab procedure which you can read on Andrew Lea's website.

Since it is so difficult to test for, Andrew Lea suggests learning how to taste for tannin in apples. He wrote in a Cider Workshop email, “Think of tannin as the taste of cold tea without milk - astringent, slightly bitter, mouth puckering. Then see if you can identify that by taste in the apple. Be very sure to distinguish it from acid, which is the sharp taste.”

People

For awhile, the doctors had me give up all fruit with the exception of low acid blueberries, watermelon, and pears. I ate a lot of pears during that period, as it replaced my apple a day. I like pears, especially boscs. They are really good with ginger snaps.

A little while after my diet restriction was lifted and I got the crazy notion to maybe brew cider, we traveled out to Hood River, OR for the Pear Festival in September. We had recently bought a house that was in need of planting some trees, and I thought pears would be nice. I started to ask a farmer a few questions about growing pear trees, and he got very curt with me. He told me not to do it, that we won’t take good care of it and it will get sick or get bugs, both of which will spread to real orchards and maybe his, and that we could buy plenty from him. Ouch! The man had some good points, and for cider, it would be easier to let someone else deal with the trees and fruit while I can focus on cider production, but the whole experience talking to this farmer left me very tentative.

A few weeks later, the Portland Nursery had a apple and pear tasting. Wandering Aengus Ciderworks was there, and he had gotten his hands on a whole bunch of cider, mostly from the east coast, for a tasting. I tentatively started asking questions, a little shy from the pear farm experience. Well, he is answering them, and next thing I know, I'm eating a cider apple that he hands me so that I can taste what a cider apple might taste like. His whole attitude was different from the pear farmer. The pear farmer saw me growing pears as a threat to his lively hood, and Wandering Aengus treated me like if I really did get serious about making cider, I would help boost the cider market and get it going, and that would be good for his business. I'm finding that attitude with a lot of cidermakers and the few mead makers I’ve talked to, and it gives me the warm fuzzies. I think I need to find a cider right now to physically give me the warm fuzzies.

Mead

I bought The Compleat Meadmaker: Home Production of Honey Wine from Your First Batch to Award-Winning Fruit and Herb Variations for Christmas. I should really do up some mead here soon. They take a while to age, but they are done up still and not carbonated.

My first taste of mead was when I was at a collogue’ house for my day job. Her husband brewed it up, and I thought it was delightful. My husband said he had mead before and didn’t like it, but this homebrewed stuff was pretty good. In December, I went to the Holiday Ale Festival at Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland, OR. Mountain Meadow’s Mead from Westwood, California was there. I tried their sweet, cranberry, semi-sweet, and spiced meads, and ended up taking home a bottle of the cranberry mead. Wonderful stuff!

There is another meadery out of California called Rabbit’s Foot Meadery. I recently found in a grocery store their Biere De Miele. It is an ale fermented with honey and is styled after a Kosch. It reads, “We use only the finest malted barley, freshest hops and German Kolsch yeast to create a wonderful and light bodied ale. Lightly hopped to allow the orange blossom aromas from the honey to come through, it is an easy to drink ale, which we are sure you will enjoy.” I mentioned that I don’t care for hops, so this wasn’t bad, falling in the somewhat drinkable but probably wouldn’t buy again. My husband liked it, though.

I went and bought a bottle of Rabbit’s Foot Sweet Mead next. Mead is not cheap, and I was having a little bit of a hard time figuring out from the labels what would be a semi-sweet or a semi-dry and avoiding the dry meads. I did make the mistake of chilling it like a white wine or a sweet cider, but the label says to drink it at room temperature. My husband didn’t like it, as it was too sweet for him.

Records

It is really important to keep good records of what you are fermenting. It lets you know what it is, how long it has been in that stage, helps to identify problems, and lets you know when it is time to drink it.

I came across a nice looking record sheet to fill in while reading The Encycolpedia of Home Winemaking – Fermentation and Winemaking Methods by Pierre Drapeau and Andre Vanasse (translated into English). However, it was an older book, and the link they supplied was long since broken. I tried googling for other record sheets. I found a few, including some software. However, they were all for grape wine, not a variable of fruits, and so I decided to create my own

It is by no means perfect, as I find myself struggling with the fact that I used my mother’s frozen peaches with a can of frozen lemonade, so I find myself writing in the margins. I also don’t test the SG enough to merit the graph, but it took me a little bit to get it into the document and I figure someday I will be working on a large enough scale that I will be taking daily SG readings and that plotting it over time. My husband can tell you – I love statistics and graphing.

Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to post this up as a PDF, and was forced to save it as two JPG files. If you want my log as a single PDF file, email me, and I will gladly send it to you. It works best if it is printed front and back side of one piece of paper.

Labels

As you can see from the picture, I didn’t label my first few batches of wine. I had recently moved, and had no idea where the left over address stickers were from all the self addressed stamped RSVP envelopes were for our wedding. However, I did know where my little bit of yarn was from the times I get crazy enough to take up knitting again. In my notes, I indicate which batch got the pink string, and which batch got the cream yarn with colored spots, etc. The pros to this system are that I can reuse the string, and I don’t have to work to get the label off for the next batch. The cons are that I have to go look at my notes instead of just looking at the bottle to know what it is and how long it has been aging. I kind of think it is time I graduated to real labels.

In The Joy of Home Winemaking by Terry Garey, she says she uses labels though her home printer, and they come out looking like this:

HELLO MY NAME IS
High Pitched Wines
FREEZER ROSÉ
12%
Made Aug 93 Bottled Feb 94

She recommends on the label that you want the name, the date bottled, and the percent alcohol if known.

There are premade bottle labels out there at the local supply stores. Basically, they are the right size with a little bit of a border, decoration, or scene that you can run though your home printer to use as your label. They are a little bit glossy and run about $7.50-$10 for 32 labels. This is a little costlier, but it would look nicer than just an address sticker.

There are “machines” that put the labels on the bottle level and consistent. I’ve only seen one at Shallon Winery when he starts talking about the $1,000 machine he needed to handle this very specific paper and glue he wanted to use on his chocolate wine. I’m speculating on how it works exactly, but I’m guessing that he has a professional printer do up a batch of labels on a long piece of paper, much like how you buy children’s stickers by the sticker. He places the bottle on top of two cylinders, and then rotates a crank. The rotation takes the sticker off of the paper and applies it to the rotating bottle. To see a demonstration, watch this.

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 Taste

What do I like to drink? Well, it seems when my husband and I go and try cider and wine, we gravitate towards the sweeter stuff. In fact, we toured a brandy distillery, and after sampling their products, we only walked away with a liquor and not the bone dry spirits.

Admittedly, I don’t know much when it comes to grape wines, but I do alright with most, but again, I like it a touch sweet. We served Willamette Valley Vineyard’s Oregon Blossom blush at our wedding, which the winery describes as the local answer to California’s Zinfandel. My husband and I also enjoy an occasional Muscat wine. With a good meal, though, about any grape wine will do.

When it comes to beer, it is an interesting story. My first beer that I ever attempted to drink was a Pyramid Ale. I don’t remember what kind, just that I didn’t like it. In my mind, I knew Pyramid was a good quality beer, but I didn’t like it. Over the years, I tried and tried again, but I always made funny faces. When I started dating my now husband, who is really into beer and loves porters and stouts, he started trying to find something I might like. Frambois worked because of the sugar and fruit juice, but most bars don’t serve it. For his birthday one year, we went to the Rogue in Portland, where they allowed us to custom pick a sampler set. I found two that I liked – one was with honey and mandarin oranges, and the other had flavorings of coriander. Both of them were wheat beers. It was like something was knocked loose, as I’m able to drink wheat beers now, especially if they have fruit in them, and an occasional honey lager such as the one from a Canadian restaurant called Earls. I don’t like hops because they are bitter, and my husband’s favorites taste burnt to me. Actually, a lot of beer tastes burnt to me. I’ll taste every beer he gets, but for me, beer is either drinkable, somewhat drinkable and I’ll need someone to finish it for me, or not drinkable.

Admittedly, I’m a bit scattered at the moment with what I want to make – cider, fruit wine, or mead. Thing is, most people think of all three of these as being sweet, but they don’t have to be. I’ve had an excellent dry cider, a dry blackberry wine you drink like a Merlot, and I know there are dry meads out there. So yes, I like my drinks sweet, but it is honestly easier to make dry alcoholic beverage, which will help strike a balance between what I like best and what others might like to buy. In the meanwhile, I’ll just keep experimenting to develop my skills and attempt to narrow my focus.