It's just occured to me......

When I was a kid, there used to be a brewery, just north of Portsmouth called "George Gale & Co". As well as a good range of beers, then also made a good range of "country" fruit wines.

I'd been lucky enough to taste some of them and my over riding memory is of fruit wines that actually tasted something like the fruit that they'd been made from, but with a base sweetness and a "kick" (which'd have been the alcohol).

Gales was taken over by "Fullers" some years ago, so I don't know if they're still making the fruit/country wines.

My problem is that I like my fruit wines like that. Fruity and sweet tasting, and not necessarily very "winey". Wines that taste, well, like wine, are to my view, made from grapes. Yes it's fair to say that I don't really know much about them, but I tend to remember some of the names and roughly where they come from. They tend to be very fruity, tannic and quite "heavy". Burgundies and Bordeaux - there are also 1 or 2 that I've enjoyed that were made in Australia, whereas the ones I've tasted from other wine making areas, well I can take them or leave them. It may be that I just haven't tasted any of the "good" ones.

I'm also finding that I'm not particularly keen on "white" country wines either. Yes, there's one or two that I don't mind but I seem to vastly prefer the red country wines, and even then they have to be quite strongly tasting of the original base fruit.

I just can't really make my mind up, but I'm thinking that I'll be having to go along the lines of just making traditional meads and then if I want some fruit flavour, to then add it after it's been made i.e. soaking the fruit in traditional mead etc to give it some fruit flavour without the actual fruit sugars being fermented.

I'll just have to put some thought into it won't I.......

Todays efforts....racking the kiwi melomel and the Apple/Blackberry

Well as you can see from the picture I've racked both the Kiwi Melomel and the Apple and Blackberry. I haven't been as thorough as I should have been with these as I let them finish in buckets. Not that that should really matter as any air space in the bucket would have been filled with the CO2 that was bubbling out during fermentation.

So what are they like etc ? Well I went (as usual) at it like "a bull in a china shop" as I just wanted to get them both off the lees and into glass. Like a pillock I forgot to take gravity readings......well I just couldn't be arsed really because a small taste I took of the Kiwi Melomel, tasted just like I expected. Like a medium dry white fruit wine, but when it came to the Apple and Blackberry, it still tasted quite sweet and fruity, so I just got it into glass and then the little bit left in the bucket was put in a test jar and when I dropped a hydrometer into it, it showed 1.000 so that's about as finished as I reckon I'll get it given the messing about it's caused me (the restart etc).

I'm thinking that I might just back sweeten both of them a bit, probably with honey. It doesn't matter too much as I'll just leave them under airlock for a couple of months that then think a bit more about how I'll actually finish them.

Still, not bad, if I do say so myself.

TTFN!