I figure it’s about time for an update about the gooseberry wine we are attempting to create. In case you missed our first post, you can read it here.

Did I mention we won’t be able to drink it for a year? Woohoo πŸ™‚ Which is actually one of the reasons we are going to try our hand at apple wine which is a very popular drink here in the Frankfurt area, especially when mixed with sparkling water or Sprite. It takes only a few months. But for those who might think about trying apple wine for the first time, I will warn you that it tastes nothing like “normal” wine. But the good news is that you can just buy the juice and start from there and we may actually be lucky enough to get a bushel or so of apples from one of Stefan’s colleagues after she harvests her apple trees in France!

Anyway, the wine now looks like this:

We have added the de-clouding chemicals but aren’t really sure how long it’s supposed to take before that goes into effect. As you can see, it’s still very cloudy. Not the end of the world but it’s not supposed to be cloudy so that has us a bit concerned. As you may have noticed, we are far from experts now and are more or less just giving this a try now to see what happens.

Here is a close up of some of the yeast hovering around the edge of the wine. These particles actually break off all the time and settle to the bottom of the container…


And I just happened to catch one on his descent. Pretty strange to say the least. Our next step will be transferring the wine over to another glass balloon (cask?? not sure that would be the correct word for them) but leave the sediment behind. And apparently that sediment can actually be dried out and used as fertilizers on your plants!


It smells like it’s fermenting and you notice it as soon as you walk into the mud room…but we’re still not totally sure we’ve done everything correctly. Eventually Stefan will do an alcohol test to see if anything is happening there or not. But we’re keeping out fingers crossed that this stuff will turn out to be drinkable. And to be honest it would be a bit of a miracle if it was since we haven’t really been following the instructions perfectly. But it’s a learning experience and we’ll keep you up to date πŸ™‚