Grandview Crabapple Wine

It all started last fall when I grabbed two five-gallon buckets and my daughter and picked enough crabapples to fill one and half buckets. It was a beautiful evening for picking and would have been even more beautiful if my daughter wouldn't have been whining the whole time about "Are we done yet?" Our friend's family owns Grandview Resort in Nisswa. He has been so kind as to let me pick the crabapples for the last couple of years because they would most likely go to waste. The first year I made jelly out of them. This year it was five gallons of wine.

This was my favorite batch of wine so far. Kevin loved it. For Christmas he asked for his very own bottle to do whatever he wanted with it. It was a huge hit at his office Christmas party this year. But because of all the drinking before it was ready to bottle, I only got a solid eight bottles out of five gallons and the rest went down the stomachs.

I started this wine on 8/30/07. I boiled all the crabapples down and squeezed them through a cheesecloth like you would for jelly. I poured everything in a five-gallon carboy (bottle) and added about four cups of sugar, one of brown sugar, four packets of wine yeast, a tablespoon of yeast nutrient and four tablespoons of tannin. Someone told me at a wine class once to just brew some very strong black tea and use that as tannin which I did in this case.

When I tasted the wine after a couple of weeks, it was very puckery from the crabapples. I bought an oak stick online through http://www.midwestsupplies.com/ (I love them, they have everything and they are so great to work with!!) I added the oak stick to the mixture and left it. Eventually the wine started to mellow. The more sugar I added to keep the yeast going, the more the taste mellowed. I didn't want to make a super sweet wine so I kept the sugar to a minimum. I racked it three times. Racking is when you syphon the wine into another jug so that the pulp, also called the lee, will sink to the bottom. I put a packet of clearing gel into it before I racked it the last time because it wasn't as clear as I wanted it. That made a huge difference and the final product was beautiful!

The taste of this wine is not real fruity. You can taste the oak and you can taste the crabapples but neither flavor is prominant. The finished product is mellow with a hint of sweetness and a slight smoky flavor.

I was so excited to get these bottles and some really pretty labels. I also bought some corks and a cheap corker. With the cheap corker, you definitely need two people to cork the bottles. Kevin and I got the hang of it after two bottles. I would recommend a corker that stands on the floor for any more than ten bottles. I would like to get one next year. I handwrote the labels as I was too lazy to set up a template in Microsoft Word. That will be my next project.

I feel very rich with twelve of my own bottles of wine. Along with my crabapple, I have two bottles of strawberry wine and two bottles of peach wine. I can't wait for the spring and summer next year, I will be a winemaking machine! I want to try dandilion, plum, strawberry, and blackberry wine. And you can bet next fall I will make about fifteen gallons of the crabapple!