The End of Winemaking

I finally calmed down after that fiasco of fermenting the Chardonel wine. I have never seen a bigger, sloppier mess than that overflowing fermenting wine pail. And I still was not too sure about this winemaking thing.

“Mom, I’m sorry. I think I may have filled the pails too high. Sorry, you had to clean up that mess.”

“Timothy, I was really mad at you that night, but I’m better now. But if there is more of cleaning up messes that takes me hours, I don’t want to help out in your winemaking.”

“Mom, it is all easy from here on out. I will come over and rack the wine into carboys. I assure you, no more mess and very little labor. I promise!”

The following day, Timothy came over, racked the wine out of the pails into carboys (racking is the transfer of wine from one vessel to another) and it was now time to age the wine. We kept the carboys, all 4 of them in our laundry room. It was actually fun to watch the wine clear and the lees (dead yeast cells) fall to the bottom of the carboy.

When the wine finally cleared, it was time for cold stabilization (cold stabilization of wine is a method used to keep tartaric acid crystals, or wine diamonds, from forming after the wine has been bottled). John and Timothy carried these very heavy 5 and 6 gallon glass carboys from the laundry room closet to the garage. We set them in a cozy corner, protected them from sunlight and left them there for a long winter’s nap.

Several times during the aging in carboy process, Timothy and his wife Becky, would come over and we all would taste the wine. These tastings were my favorite days. I loved seeing how the wine was progressing. Our first tastes were unimpressive. It tasted like wine, but there was something not right. Everyone agreed that something was off but could not put our finger on it. Maybe it just needed to age a bit.

When spring arrived it was time to rack the wine off the wine crystals and get the wine ready for bottling. We tasted the wine again and all agreed something was not right. Maybe the wine just needed to be backsweetened (the process of adding sugar or juice to a fermented wine). So we siphoned some wine out of the carboys into several glasses. We added sugar in increments to each glass. The sweetness was definitely helping the wine but something was still not right. This was a dilemma none of us could figure out.

I decided that if I was going to get into this winemaking hobby, it was now time to start doing some research. I found several online sites that were helpful. But I could not determine why this wine tasted – actually – bad! I did read somewhere that the wine needed to age. That must be the problem. I figured once we bottled the wine and let it age a few months, it would be a delicious drinkable wine.

Bottling day finally arrived. It was a beautiful, cool, springtime day. Prior to the family arriving, we filtered the wine. Remember the broken hydrometer that Timothy assured me would be fine once we filtered the wine? Knowing we had to filter out glass chards and a final clearing of the wine, we rented the Buon Vino wine filter which squirted our precious wine all over and onto us. What was going wrong? There were no directions with the rental but after doing some research, we realized that we put the filters in wrong. After cleaning up the mess, put the filters in correctly, losing several ounces of wine, the Buon Vino did a fine job and eased my mind that no one was going to die from swallowing glass shards.

Everyone arrived on time and the family adventure of bottling commenced. Each took turns washing and sanitizing bottles, filling the bottles with wine and corking the bottles. Then came the time to put the coveted labels on the bottles. Timothy named his wine Wompelia Chardonel. Wompelia was a name that Timothy used for his mushroom farming and decided to keep the name for his wines.

He asked my artist sister, Rose, if he could use one of her paintings as the main design for his label. It was a beautiful watercolor of a mountainside in Cypress. The painting was a wedding gift from Rose to Timothy and Becky which they loved. The best thing about the Wompelia, Chardonel was the label.

The Wompelia wine was not very good. Actually, it was really bad. It was a lot of work without the fruition of a drinkable wine. Aging did not help. Most of us disposed of the wine.

Timothy called after dumping his wine.

“Mom, I am calling it a day. I give up. My enthusiasm has outweighed my knowledge. If you continue in the winemaking, I will be your right hand man and loudest cheerleader. I am giving up winemaking!”

And the story continues as I became the winemaker.

(If you want to follow Timothy’s current adventure, go to www.mrmeoski.com and on Facebook Mr. Meowski’s bakery page https://www.facebook.com/MrMeowskis. He has one of the best bakeries in the St. Louis area (his bakery is in St. Charles) specializing in sourdough bread and croissants.)

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