The big jugs hold grape and dandelion wine, respectively, while the gallon jugs hold, variously, elderberry, mulberry, pomegranate, blueberry/kiwi/mulberry and ginger wine. The last was, to me, the best.
Robin siphons off dandelion wine for tasting. It was very sweet.
In between tasting and bottling we nibbled on buttermilk biscuits, flax/millet cracker/cheddar cheese, pears, and Dagoba chocolate with chili pepper. Next time I will start with the nibbling. Tasting wine at noon on an empty stomach quickly made me loopy, though it did bring back memories of travels in Central Europe.Neighbor Robin S. has started making her own wines and needed help bottling. At noon one day last week I went to Robin's to taste and bottle. We started out tasting down in the basement where she has had the wine stored for many months, then moved up to the kitchen, where bottles and corks were already being sterilized. Corking the bottles takes a lot more strength than uncorking does, but once we got into a rhythm it went pretty well. Still there were corks that just wouldn't go in flush and had to be discarded. Some bottles we recorked, others we tabbed for early consumption.
We ended up with 36 bottles. It took all afternoon to do them, including writing out the labels and affixing them. We finished just as Robin's husband came home from work. (Good timing on his part!) I left soon after with a bottle of each wine we put up. The ginger is already gone.
