Days of Wine and Vinegar

Last year, I made my very first batch of home-made vinegar.

I took about a half gallon of plum juice from our fall harvest of blue italian plums and some vinegar "mother" I found lurking in a grey blobbish mass at the bottom of an old bottle of balsamic vinegar and put them together and let the whole mess sit for about 6 weeks. When the 6 weeks was over, my hubby and I tasted the results and decided it was by far the very best vinegar either of us had ever tasted - but because we'd already dried or canned all the plums for the season, we had to wait another year to try it again.

So this year, I have about TWO gallons of both plum and apple cider vinegar going, plus one gallon of cherry wine vinegar, and one gallon each of plum wine, cherry wine, and apple wine. Because the temps down in the storage room are a bit cool now, everything has to be upstairs where it's 70 degrees. But the problem is I just realized today that by bringing all these burping, burbling jugs up here to brew I've lost about a third of my kitchen counter space until close to the end of the year. Ooops.

Actually, I think I may have gone a bit brew crazy. I was thinking about meads and wheat beers the other night when I was trying to fall asleep. And I've already made plans to try to brew some balsamic vinegar as soon as I can. It turns out from my research that it's really not that difficult - all you do differently is condense the grape must down to about 1/3 of its original volume, cool it, then seed it with "mother" and proceed as usual. Oh, there is that little bit about aging it for a while - um, maybe a few years...but other than that it's all business as usual.

And given the state of my storage room at the moment, I'm sure I can find a place to store (er...lose) a jug of home made balsamic vinegar for a couple of years at least...