After Thanksgiving, I took advantage of the sale on cranberries by making cranberry wine. At Jack Keller's suggestion, I used the highbush recipe on his site:
I've finally bottled it. Some I bottled with priming sugar to make sparkling wine. The rest is just a red wine. I bottled 4 days ago and have tasted it. It's kind of harsh, but I don't think it's bad. I'm wondering how long I might have to wait on it.
Instead of using golden raisins-sultanas, I used Californian raisins. I only now discovered that mistake. This may explain the darker color of the wine. I manually pressed the berries-raisins after an initial fermentation using just my hands. Well, they were sanitized and all; I remember not being able to scratch some itches while I was doing that. I don't think I got an infection in the wine, but I may have over pressed.
The flavor is kind of bitter. The bitterness isn't in the initial taste. The impression I get from the first sip is church wine. Kind of diluted, but very warming. The wine does warm up my chest. My girlfriend thought I reeked of booze after a glbutt of this wine. I don't have the OG, so I don't know the conversion. The FG was 1.002 at 55 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm thinking there might be some fusel in the wine since it was fermenting at around 72 degrees ambient temperature.
It seems to me that the wine needs about half a year in bottles before it'll taste sane. I'm wondering about the bitterness and the general booziness. I've only made one other red wine before--from a kit. It had intially a rubbery taste leftover from yeast, and that aged out quickly.
