Welches Wine 1/8/2016

For Christmas my beautiful and amazing wife got me some wine making stuff. Very excited. First wine is usually Welches. It's like writing a Hello World application for coders.

Ingredients:

• 1 Can frozen juice 
• 1 packet of wine yeast 
• 1 cup sugar 
• 1 tbsp yeast food (no idea what it is but why not try it) 

Heated water in microwave and put in sugar. Cooked till hot enough to melt sugar. Cooled it to 90° and poured some off and added yeast to get started.  I've been using my infrared thermometer and assuming that it reads a little cooler than the actual liquid temperature.  This isn't rocket science after all.

I warmed the juice a little and added to the jug and added water. Checked temp and kept it at around 80°. Made sure yeast starter was fizzing and happy and poured it in. Poured on yeast food, mixed, and topped off water. Checked gravity at 1.040. Put in fermentary with a balloon on top to watch process.

After a day the thing was cooking like crazy!  After 4 days the balloon stopped growing.  I tested the gravity and it was at about zero.  I'll take it off of the old yeast today (1/12/2017).

After reading some things online I wonder if I disrupted the yeast with the balloon.  I should have used a cloth.  We'll see.

1/14/2017 - After 2 days the gravity hasn't changed so I'm ready to bottle it.  There was still some yeast sediment settled at the bottom of the jug so I siphoned it off into another jug and got some bottles ready.  I had a little taste from the bit that I pulled for the gravity test.  A little light on taste but you could taste that there was alcohol in there.  Actually tasted pretty good for a first try.  I bottled it up and set it in the basement  I'm resigned to not tasting it for 30 days to see how the flavor changes.  This has been a really fun experiment.

2/14/2017 - We decided to have some of this with Valentine's day dinner.  It was a little on the light side but the flavor was great.  Excited to see if it will change with more time.

Wine in second ferment with airlock:

1/2/2018 - This wine actually turned out very nicely.  After 11+ months in the cellar I pulled it out to celebrate  the new year.  It was light but the flavor had grown a little.  It actually had a little more kick than I remembered and is really pretty.  I may make this again as a simple table wine.