Christmas Wine 2023
Happy Holiday Season! Christmas wines are bottled, labeled, and ready to spread some Christmas cheer!
Wine number one is the old faithful, Peach on Earth. The peach wine is the unchallenged favorite of all my wines, and I have made more batches of that wine than any other, totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 gallons worth at this point. This version came in at 10.5 ABV, with all the usual delicious flavor. This wine is the sweet tea of my winery, just a good, solid wine that goes well with just about any dish or occasion. I will likely start another batch of this wine to have ready for springtime, it just never seems to last very long in the wine cellar!
Second up is White Chocolate Raspberry, a new twist on another solid performer. I started with a standard 5 gallon batch of raspberry wine (using my basic fruit wine recipe listed in the recipe section,) added a cup of sweet cacao nibs for secondary fermentation, and before bottling I back sweetened/flavored with a 750ml bottle of Torani white chocolate syrup. Between the nibs (basically just crushed cocoa beans) and the syrup this wine has really nice hints of chocolate. Unlike a lot of berry fruits, raspberry wine usually retains a strong flavor from the raspberries, so the chocolate is a nice balance to the fruit flavor. Torani syrups come in a lot of flavors and are great to add a different taste to a basic wine, don't hesitate to experiment with them. I find a 750ml bottle is just about right for a 5 gallon batch of wine, you can add more or less to suit your individual preference. I do only use the regular flavors, the sugar-free versions just don't seem as bold to me, but again, suit yourself on that.
As far as other wines in process, I have a mango wine aging that will likely find its way into the bottle early next year, and another wine made from a variety of grapes named cotton candy (they taste very much like cotton candy strangely enough!) that are only available occasionally at the local Publix grocery store. I have made that one before, and it has good flavor and is a fun little wine. It should be ready for bottling soon as well. Not sure what's up next, but I feel sure it will be some form of mead, I have been on a mead kick for a while and am considering getting back into beekeeping to add another dimension to the hobby. We'll see how that goes, my ADD may have me going in a totally different direction next year so who knows!
I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, may God richly bless you and your families!