Day 13: The visit to the wise wine lady.

Today our winemaking adventures took an interesting turn, after we popped to Leyland to have a look around the homebrew shop.
We met a lady in the shop who, in exchange for a variety of winemaking products, liberated Jonee of much of his cash. She also took a great deal of time out of her day to tell us that almost everything we've done so far is absolutely wrong. She said a lot of things that I can't remember, but I'll try and summarise.

After a week of gently stewing, we needed to strain the fruity mixture and then add the yeast, I think. It is at that point that we also need to use a hydrometer to measure the density of the stuff - it is by doing this that we can approximate the alcohol content of the wine later on.

We went home and immediately tried to rectify our errors so far - hilarity ensued.


We tasted a little of the wine at this part of the process, and Jonee is keen for me to stress that it tasted lovely.
The nice lady also mentioned that all the old wine recipes - those more than 40 years old - are wrong, because they didn't know all the science back then. That's great news for us, because the recipe we're (loosely) following was written in 1978, 32 years ago. Still, we're expecting that it's not totally accurate, as we've realised.

We might start a new batch at some point - Jonee's been eyeing up some juicy pears...

Sam and Jonee