Maple Syrup Wine 2/19/2017

This weekend we were having pancakes and Charlee says, "I love maple syrup.  Can you make wine from it?"  Of course, it's mostly sugar.  So I didn't even look this one up.  I just used what I knew from making mead.  I went for approximately 25% sugar content by weight.

• 4 cups maple syrup
• 1 cup sugar
• Box of raisins
• Water and yeast
• Yeast nutrient

Nothing fancy.  I didn't even heat the water on the stove since my tap water get's pretty hot.  Maple syrup has 53g sugar for 4 tbsp.  16 tbsp. per cup which makes 212g per cup.  A pound of sugar is 450g. So 4 cups makes 848g or 1.8 pounds.  A little extra sugar to get to 25%.  I was too excited to actually take a hydrometer reading.

I mixed the hot water and maple syrup in the gallon jug and poured the raisins in.  I heated a little water in the microwave to melt the cup of sugar and poured that in along with the yeast nutrient.  Rehydrated the yeast and pitched it in.  Within an hour it was bubbling pretty aggressively.  Depending on how it tastes when it finishes I may back-sweeten it with sugar or maple syrup.

3/5/2017 - It's still bubbling pretty well.  I could see a fair amount of old yeast at the bottom and so I siphoned it into a new bottle to let it settle and continue fermenting.  It has a slight bourbon taste.  Very enjoyable.  Unsure if I'll back sweeten or not.  I'm not a huge fan of sweet wines anyway.

1/24/2018 - Opened this to have with a Christmastime pork meal.  Wonderful.  Finished it off over the next couple of months.  I really liked the character and taste.  Although expensive I may make a small batch of this again.  It was really good.