This is the 5th installment of this story. You can find the 1st one here

Most old German families in our rural Iowa community made their own wine.  Not much, but some each summer and not necessarily out of grapes.  What ever was in the current batch was in a 5 gallon “Red Wing” crock, sitting on the kitchen counter, covered with a thin dish towel  with little fruit lies hovering over it day and night.  Who would ever drink this stuff that bugs liked that much?  I was truly clueless at age 9.

I was lucky as a kid as Grandma had Concord grape vines along her garden when I was very small.  I remember sitting in the grass at the base of those vines and eating the sweet grapes with my grandfather.  They were really good! Then the modern farm chemicals came along like 2-4-D.  The vines curled, browned and dried up and fell off.  The vines never came back and were dead by the next spring.  Everybody justified the loss of the local grapes as “progress” in farming as corn was worth so much more compared to a few grapes.  Sad, but it was true.

With the grapes gone from the area, wine was then made from all kinds of “stuff”, not just grapes.  Raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, mulberries, cherries, rhubarb, pear and even dandelions were turned into wine.  I did remember that once the mix was made and put into the crock, the work was done.  How it ever turned out was not known to me and at that age, I really didn’t care.

In 1971, my wife and I were in our college apartment and the popular thing to do in our circle of friends was to make wine in a gallon plastic milk jug with a really expensive (25¢) balloon on the top.  We mixed the concentrated “Welch’s Grape Juice”, water, sugar and yeast into the jug and patiently watched over the next days the balloon stretch to amazing limits.  What excitement!  The anticipation was off the scale for both of us!  We waited until the balloon had completely deflated (about 3-4 weeks) and carefully poured the contents into a new plastic jug.  We tried it! It was amazingly pretty good!  We shared it with another couple and they were equally amazed.  Let’s do it again!  So, we did.

We diligently bought the ingredients for the next batch, mixed it in a gallon plastic milk jug and bought a new balloon (another 25¢ expensive balloon down the drain).  The concoction was set on top of the refrigerator in our small apartment and we watched the balloon expand over the next days and were quite pleased with ourselves now that we considered ourselves great wine makers.

That balloon was at full extension sitting up there on that warm refrigerator and that is when we encountered our first wine making disaster!  We had just gone to bed that fateful night when we heard a large “POP” from the kitchen!  We knew it had to be the wine so I jumped out of bed, ran into that little kitchen, threw on the light, and there on the top of the refrigerator sat our Siamese cat “Sam” looking at her paw that was holding the remains of the green balloon next to the now purple wall beside the jug.

Well, that batch ended up shot to heck as we rushed out the next day and got another balloon to put on the top but the mixture never made it to the “wine” stage.  The cat was none too popular at this point either!  We tried a couple more times to make “grape juice” wine but it never turned out quite the same as that first batch.  That was the end of our wine making career.  Buying it was much easier – and cheaper! 

Jim Albinger (Andrew’s dad) grew up in small-town northwest Iowa in the 1950’s.  He has been writing down his experiences looking back at all that has shaped his current wine tasting hobby.  Expect to see more of Jim’s writings here at offthecork.com.

You can find the next installment of this story here

Tags: homebrew, juice, wine

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