Red wine vinegar
 

Got about 25 bottles of red wine (mostly Cabernet and Merlot) that is reaching the end of its shelf life a lot of them are from 2000. So I decided to try my hand making red wine vinegar. Read up on it a little and came up with a recipe that calls for 1 part raw unfiltered vinegar (with the mother) to 2 parts red wine. Let it sit for up to a month until the mother forms on top. Drain or syphon off leaving mother and enough wine to start another batch, kinda like making sourdough bread. Anyone here make red wine vinegar before?

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No but I might start considering the price of the stuff.
Worth

[QUOTE=Worth1;667975]No but I might start considering the price of the stuff.
Worth[/QUOTE]

Supposedly home made tastes a lot better than store bought. Yes they are pretty proud of the stuff when you go to buy it at the store.

I think I'm going to store it in sterilized pint jars when it's done.

Back to the wine part a (fine wine) can be stored for decades in a wine cellar kept at around 50 to 55 degrees and somewhat humid.
With your common cheaper shelf wines it isn't going to happen.

I personally wouldn't know a fine wine from a self wine if it fell out of the sky and hit me in the head.
I highly doubt I have ever had a >>>>fine wine<<<< in my life.:lol:
My wine consumption began with homemade wine when I was a child.

Worth

I've had port wines that were over 40 years old and it was quite good. With some 15 year old aged cheddar it would have been better!

Yes, it is the best. I still have 5-6 quarts from the 5 gallons I
made 2015. No fruit last year, nada, not even the elder wild
apples.
I made Peary from Asian Pears...that harvest was probably 6
bushels, an apple cider vinegar and a Concord grape.
We made cider and hard cider but just no time this year.

This year no Asian pears, well, just a few we ate Fresh.
Late Spring frost. A frost tender tree. Bear got my regular pears
and broke three limbs. Caught him sitting in it, bear-handed.

Lots of apples this year. 6 bushels so far and 4x that still on trees.
Not sure how much more we will have time for. A hour or two on
a 12 ft lader is about my limit.

I know you are posting about using wine but the process is similar
and reminded me I can use up some box wine I've been using for
cooking and make a batch when I start a batch of apple cider
vinegar. So, thanks for that reminder!

An old operator I worked with years ago, made stuff he called apple jack. He brought a few quart jars of it and handed it out. It tasted good but had a weird texture like runny apple sauce that burned your throat when you drank it. As I recall it also left you with a horrible hangover the next day.

I had a friend that made homemade wine from home grown grapes, it did the same thing but in about an hour or two you had a splitting headache and I mean from just a glass or two.
I have no idea what causes this.
I considered it poison.

Worth

A friend gave us a pint Ball jar of homemade moonshine last
x-mas that tastes like apple pie, :wacky::evil:
One sip was enough...still in the cupboard.

My grandfather made wine under his kitchen sink in the cabinet...until it blew up and caught the wall on fire. oops

We used to have the whole wine making set up in the basement when I was young. Giant wooden barrels, grape crusher, wine press.

The grapes would be crushed into topless barrels to ferment, the fermented juice would be strained into closed barrels, the peels and stems pressed to get the rest of the juice out which was then added to the closed barrels, and they would be capped and the wine aged until dad decided it was ready.

Nothing went to waste. The stems and peels were turned into the garden, the fresh wine was enjoyed, and any wine that got too old went into a smaller (10 gallon?) barrel in the corner of the basement to become vinegar.

One of the reasons that apples were so widely grown in the NE American colonies is that they were the primary source of spirits: hard cider, [B]applejack[/B], and apple brandy, the latter two being the most traded because they travel well. Grain-based spirits didn't become popular until somewhat later.

Check the wikipedia article on applejack. It is 'distilled' without using heat. Commercial applejack (actually 35% apple brandy) is quite drinkable (I use it in my apple pies) - not like the stuff described above. But I bet he made it in his freezer.

Making wine and vinegar are too different ball games.
With wine you don't want any oxygen to get in it .
With vinegar you must let oxygen in . Vinegar bacteria (mother or daughters ?) needs oxygen to convert alcohol into acetic acid. So it is better to do it in a container with a lot of air exposure and maybe stirred now and then. You can cover it with a cloth to preven insects and dust falling into it.
Once tou have vinegar, you can store it in any wine bottle. Just wash and rinse , no need to disinfect. Vinegar itself is a good disinfectant.

Note: A good wine vinegar is much more expensive than the wine, as it require additional process, time and effort. But IMO it is worth it.

I love good wine vinegar and good balsamic vinegar in salad dressings but good wine vinegar is very expensive and hard to find around here. Does it matter the type wine used in making wine vinegar? Sounds like something good to try if it isn't too difficult.
I'm going to do some research on it right now.

Bill