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Made with the freshest fruits on earth! The Tastiest frozen fruit on sale at FoodLion! The most flavorful free raspberry's from Jason's mom's garden! The Finest free grapes from Dave's coworkers!

In primary now: Blueberry!

Past Vintages:Calvin Opus Shoveller BigGayAl Huey LarryBerry
LittleTart 'Darryl' Strawberry

This was my first attempt at Raspberry wine. Turned out to be really sweet, so went over well as a desert/sipping wine. Much like an alcoholic raspberry Kool-Aid. I named it for the crazy way the yeast were converting sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide. So the gas produced was "bubblin' like mad" out of the vapor lock!
Second attempt at Raspberry wine. This one turned out fine, but not nearly as sweet as the first. We liked to consider it more of an "acquired taste," the kind you acquire from spending too many years saying "sure, I'll have another shot!"
Dave decided he wanted to try a Strawberry wine. So being purists, we ran over to FoodLion and grabbed twenty quarts of the freshest strawberries they had! A few hours of coring the berries we were ready to go. Once again a stronger wine, but with a definite strawberry aftertaste! (and not-so-subtle alcohol first taste)
Being almost out of Shoveller it was time to Vint again, but we had nothing to ferment. A quick trip to FoodLion and we were on our way. Seems that with our MVP Cards we got a nice discount on bags of frozen "mixed fruit." blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries as I recall. This is the first time we chose our Theme Character based on the wine itself. Who better to represent all the fruits in our wine than Big Gay Al?!
It was time to drag Becca into my world of WineMaking. So we made a really dry raspberry wine (once again with my mom's raspberries). It turned out pretty darned good, I wasn't ashamed/afraid to share it with lots of people. We named it Huey after a comic strip character we both liked a lot, and the name and quote are very appropriately tied to him.
So one night Dave asks if we can make wine from grapes. Wine from Grapes? Never tried that! So we did. And it went really well! Uh, except for the end, when I had a little problem getting the yeast to stop using up our sugar when we were really happy with the flavor of it. A few days (and phonecalls to Maryland Homebrew) later our uppity-yeast problem was solved. We were afraid it was going to be a little bitter, but in the end it turned out to be quite a nice little desert wine!
This fresh-raspberry-n-juice from the store was a ninja fermenter. Never bubbled, just seemed to quietly sit there. So after a month I got Yeast Re-Starter, added that, but to no avail. So I figured at least I had some really good juice I could add booze to. But a quick hydrometer check and to my surprise all the sugar had turned to booze. So we added a little more juice to fight some of the dryness of the mix, let it sit for a while and bottled. But at the very end we decided that it was a fine little wine, but a little more tart than I usually make. So we named it "A Little Tart" and decided to attach our favorite little tart, Sally, to it.
started at the same time as 'Sally', this strawberry wine is even more powerful, but because of some extra juice added post-fermentation the kick of way too much alcohol is well hidden. So it's not a wine for anybody, but maybe the kinda thing a highly trained professional athlete, like our pal Darryl Strawberry, will be drinking one day. This is a wine that says "I'm unconventional, I'm cosmopolitan, and there's a big difference between a hobby and a problem"...