We started making our first batch of wine last week from some of the gooseberries in our yard. We stopped in Hornbach (home improvement store) really quickly, sort of by accident, because we knew there was an ATM inside the store and couldn’t seem to find one anywhere else. When we walked in the front door, we were greeted with a wine-making display and decided we might as well just buy the stuff. A colleague of Stefan’s has offered for us to have her stuff because she never uses it but we hadn’t gotten around to picking it up. We actually will be going this weekend finally to get it and then it will be a wine making extravaganza!
Here was the wine in it’s initial state, after pressing the gooseberries and adding them to boiling sugar water.
Since then we have added in the yeast and put it into a large wine canister but still need to pick up some campden tablets to get things on their way again. Stefan’s parents also brought us a 10 liter wine bottle to go along with the one we bought new…and the 4 or 5 huge ones we have in our wine cellar that were left by the previous owner.
Stefan’s next try at wine will be apple wine which is a very popular drink here in Germany. Since the apples in the orchard around the corner from us aren’t ripe yet and we don’t really want to buy a bunch of fresh apples to press ourselves or have pressed by someone else, we are thinking of just buying fresh apple juice from a local place (it’s apple country here after all) and start from there. And hopefully in the fall we can make something from all the grapes growing on our vines here in the courtyard. We haven’t got a clue what they are but we’re going to try it anyway 🙂
