Wine not? A great way to enjoy your produce

[Jared77]

That's encouraging. How dark was the chocolate you started with? I'm thinking next should be a chocolate/raspberry wine or a chocolate strawberry wine.....

Wonder if you could do a blend of them to get the desired flavor

 

[Kassaundra]

This is chocolate strawberry, it has one 8 oz container of cocoa, 2 bananas and 2 bags of frozen strawberries.

 

[catjac1975]

We have a gallon of wine from our greengage plums, still sitting with the fermentation lock on it from last year. It turned out a lot darker than I expected, considering they were green plums. It should be bottled, but the wine-making is usually DH's baby, and he's had his arm in a cast all summer because of a motorcycle accident (he tried to play chicken with a deer; the deer won). I guess he'll have to talk me through this.
Instead of corking the bottles, he has a bottle-capper he likes to use.

Yikes to the accident!

 

[Kassaundra]

Here is how the color is changing, today it looks more like carmel then baby poop.

 

[baymule]

Hmmm.....chocolate mint maybe? I love those York mint patties, now we can have chocolate-mint wine!!

 

[Kassaundra]

The chocolate wine is basically finished fermenting, letting it settle now. I will do the first racking this next week. I snuck a taste, it needs to age a bit, but it is good, a nice mix between the chocolate and a wine flavor. Don't really taste much of the strawberry or banana though. It is a sweet wine but leaves a little tartness on the tongue. Aged a bit and chilled especially as a dessert wine I really think it is going to be nice.

 

[Kassaundra]

Raspberry wine is bottled and aging, it is a more "full bodied" wine, still a sweet wine but not as light as the others I've done, it is really good, but only got 5 quarts.

The chocolate wine had it's first racking some of the sludge collected and ready to "seed" my next batch of chocolate wine. It has quite a ways to go to clear, but I honestly don't know how much will be there to bottle by the time it clears, "quality control" has done a number on how much I have left! lol lol lol As it stands now I think about 1/2 has been sacrificed to continuing quality control ....................... one glass at a time.

 

[Jared77]

Quality control is very important!

 

[Kassaundra]

Well, a few weeks ago we had a big killing freeze coming, so I went out and picked all the mint that was easy to pic (long stemy stuff) I got 2 wally world sacs full. I pureed them w/ water in the blender and set the juice in the fridge for a few weeks to meld, seep, infuse whatever you want to call it. Today I have 2.5 gallons of prewine (mint) and a cookie sheet full of mint "cookies" for the rabbits.

 

[Smart Red]

Neat! I picked all the mint from my plants. . . and tossed them when I dug up the plants for overwintering inside. Never thought of doing those things with them. Darn!