Strawberry Wine

We butchered a cow a few weeks back, or rather, we dropped the cow off at the butcher to let them do it for us. We picked up the frozen and packaged meat over the weekend and we were loading into our deep chest freezer in the basement when we realized that there wasn’t going to be enough room for all the beef plus the stored fruits that were already down there. We had to make an executive decision about what to do with all of the overload, and figuring the meat to be the more expensive, therefore, more valuable commodity, we decided it would get the hard to come by freezer real estate.

That left us with bags upon bags of quickly thawing quarts and gallon size containers of strawberries, blueberries, and grapes in our sink, on every available inch of kitchen counter, and inside bowls and boxes scattered about the house. We set to work quickly turning the strawberries and rhubarb into jams, feeding the older outdated grated zucchini to the chickens (that is not wasteful, we’ll just eat those nutrients later in the form of same day farm fresh eggs), dehydrating last year’s beef into jerky, and preparing the grapes to process into jelly. Not all of the strawberries made it. Last month I was doing an inventory of the chest freezer knowing we had the beef going to the slaughter pretty soon. We had so many quarts of strawberries down there; there was no way I would be able to find a use for them all over the next month. I made strawberry cobblers for desserts, and my mom and I canned up about three years’ worth of jams, and it hardly put a dent in the strawberry stock pile. After the beef arrived, and we no longer had room for all the stored fruits, we moved most of them into coolers out on the porch. Normally this time of year that would work just as well as a freezer, but with this unseasonably warm winter they started to thaw. 

What to do? We had about thirty quart size freezer bags full of strawberries we had harvested over the summer, and it would seem like such a shame to let them just go to waste, and we had already fed the chickens an abundance of our produce. I went back down into the basement and started to dig out the food safe five gallon buckets, and the five gallon plastic jugs… I was going to turn these strawberries into wine.

After class today I stopped by Begick's Nursery on my way home. They are a nursery/Christmas store/wine making supply store, conveniently located about a mile away from my schools parking lot. I picked up enough of the specialty yeast I would need in order to make twenty gallons of wine, but once I got home I settled on a more realistic approach and got the stuff together to make a five gallon batch.

I started with a seven gallon food safe bucket,

 

I then measured out 15 pounds of strawberries,

That last picture only showed me measuring out two pounds; this is what all fifteen pounds looked like,

When all was said and done, it was about two gallons worth of berries. I then added ten pounds of sugar and twenty five pints of boiling water. I stirred enough to get all of the sugar dissolved. I put a lid on it, and now I am going to let it sit overnight in a warm spot. Tomorrow when the mixture is around seventy-five degrees I will add the yeast… and then the magic will begin.