Panya Wine: A how to:

 

 

Welcome to the Panya winery. This escapade has flourished over the last few months, and as a result, a fine array of interesting wines have been produced, to fuel our nights of frivolity. I wanted to try and share some of what I've learned, in the hope that ideally, a new long term member of Panya will honourably take up the wine maker’s torch, and ensure the safe continuation of wine production for many future generations of smelly permaculturists to come.

 

Making tasty wine is very easy, and if you follow a few simple steps you will find that it is actually quite hard to make a bad wine.

 

 

 

Take 1.5kg of fresh ginger. Slice it all up fairly thin, with the skins, and then boil it for about one and a half hours in the biggest pot we have (about 18 litres), so you essentially end up with a very strong tea brew.

 

When the ginger has boiled, keep the fire going and add 5kg of sugar. Don't boil the sugar, as it might burn or caramelise. Just stir until completely dissolved and then take off the heat and leave to cool until the next day.

 

Pour or siphon the mixture into your final 20L container. For this it's good to use a funnel and a sieve to catch any small bits of debris.

 

Add wine yeast, and give the mix a good shake.

 

Fit an airlock or loose fitting lid, and leave to ferment for 5 weeks.

 

Don't forget to label and date the wine.

 

 

This is how easy it is to make an impressive, fine tasting wine. The process can become slightly more scientific though, which I think is good to know about, even if you choose not to make wine like this. This is epic, so you might want to go and get a cushion.  First, the mighty hydrometer:

 

A hydrometer tests the specific gravity (SG), or relative weight of different fluids, and in wine making is used to work out the wine's alcohol content. Water has a specific gravity of 1, whereas alcohol, being lighter has a SG of around 0.990. A sweet mixture, being heavier may have a SG of 1.180. As the sugar content decreases and alcohol is produced, the hydrometer will sink lower into the liquid as the mixture becomes lighter, or less dense. A wine and beer hydrometer fortunately also has a scale of "potential alcohol", which is incredibly useful, as it means you don't actually need to know about specific gravity readings. The potential alcohol is not the amount of alcohol you have now, but the amount of alcohol you will have at the end of fermentation, assuming that all other conditions;- temperature, light, time, or your yeast type – will allow the yeast to ferment that far. In the fermentation process, the yeast eats the sugar and produces alcohol (ethanol), and it is this change that is measured using a hydrometer. Before fermentation begins, if you obtain a reading of potential 14%, then this will be your final alcohol percentage, as long as everything else goes to plan. This doesn't mean you have 14% alcohol now, as before fermentation begins there is no alcohol at all. You can check this reading at any time during the fermentation process. After two weeks, if the wine is measured, you may have a potential alcohol reading of 8%. This is a change of 6% from the original 14%. It's this change which is important, because it's this change which is our real alcohol content, meaning in this case our wine now has an alcohol content of 6%. If the wine is measured again after three weeks, you may have a reading of 5%. This is a change of 9% from the original 14%, and so our wine now has a real alcohol level of 9%. Super.

 

Once you have boiled your mixture, in this case ginger, and before you have added any sugar, you can work out exactly how much sugar you need to add, to reach your desired percentage of alcohol. You will need a long glass beaker, a thermometer and the mighty hydrometer. Fill the glass beaker with the unsweetened brew, and leave to cool to 20'C. Place the hydrometer into the mix, and spin it to remove any air bubbles. Ginger has only a small amount of natural sugar, and so you would expect to obtain a SG reading of around 1.010, which translates on the scale as a potential alcohol content of about 1%. This means that if you add no extra sugar, you will have a wine with an alcohol content of 1%. Let's say you are aiming for a generous final alcohol content of 15%, which of course is 14% higher than what you already have – 1%. To work out exactly how much sugar you will need to add, all you need to know is this: To gain 1% alcohol in 1L of liquid, you must add 17g of sugar. So you can work it out from there. To obtain 1% alcohol in 20 litres of wine you need 340g of sugar – (17g x 20L = 340g). So, to obtain 14% extra alcohol, you multiply 340g (1%), by 14, to get a total of 4940g. This is a nice base to work from, and as a rough guide works out to be around 1kg of sugar per gallon (4L). Got that? Good. You can use this to work out the desired alcohol content for any wine, and can be used to make your wine as strong or as mild as you like. Fruits such as pineapple and lime are much higher in natural sugar, and so will yield a higher alcohol content to begin with.

 

Add the sugar and leave to cool to 20'C. This sweetened but unfermented mixture is known as the "must". Once it's cool it's time to add the yeast.

 

 

 

Yeast will die if it gets too hot, too cold, if it runs out of nutrients, or if the alcohol content gets too high for it to survive. This varies for different yeasts, but can be useful to know, as you can pick a yeast that will die at your desired alcohol percentage, and then plan the amount of excess sugar you want to add in to make a sweeter wine. Yeast can also become overpowered by foreign yeasts and bacteria from the air, so it is important to make sure that you add enough yeast for your yeast to become the dominant bacteria in the wine.

 

It's fine to add a new packet of yeast to a new bottle of wine, but if you're continuously making new wines at least every couple of weeks, this is unnecessary, and is a waste of new wine yeast. To inoculate the new wine; i.e. add enough yeast so that our yeast is the dominant bacteria, find a wine that is still fermenting, and siphon off about half a litre to use as a starter. Ideally you should pick the youngest wine, as this will be fermenting fastest and have the most active yeast, but it is not essential. You can take a starter from any fermenting wine, even if it is right near the end of its fermentation process. Pour this starter into your new wine, and shake it to mix the yeast in. This is the only time you should shake the wine. From now on it's important that the wine should be left somewhere where it will not be disturbed throughout the fermentation process. Any movement will shake up the dead yeast on the bottom, and affect the flavour of the wine. Now that the yeast has a new food source it will begin to breed, and then start to produce alcohol. You can use this technique pretty much indefinitely, which means as long as you are making a new batch of wine at least every few weeks, you won’t need to buy any new yeast. Make sure you leave the wine away from direct sunlight, and somewhere not too hot or too cold. A comfortable room temperature seems to be ideal. 

 

 

 

If you have one you should fit an airlock at this point. Airlocks are not essential, but are incredibly useful for a number of reasons. They prevent foreign bacteria in the air from contaminating the wine, while allowing the carbon dioxide to escape, preventing pressure from building up inside the bottle. They keep out dust and insects, because the ants love the sugary brew! Also once a wine has begun to ferment, which can take up to three days, you can time the gaps between the bubbles in the air lock, and use this time to gauge the progress of the wine. When it starts to ferment well, the bubbles will come around every 1 – 2 seconds. This will slow down as more alcohol is produced. I've been told that once the gaps in the air bubbles reach 20 seconds or more, then the wine is good to drink, but I've found that waiting until you have at least a one minute gap gives a far tastier wine. Be sure to check the airlocks periodically to make sure they still have water in them.

 

Airlocks are especially useful at the start and at the end of the fermentation process, to gauge when it has started, and when it is close to finishing. We only have four airlocks at the moment, so it's good to change them around every now and then, to use them wherever they are needed most.

 

If there's no airlock it's not a problem. Cover the lid of the bottle by either leaving the lid on loosely or using a fine cloth, to keep the dust out but allow the pressure to escape. You can get a rough idea of the progress of fermentation by listening at the mouth of the bottle for air bubbles.

 

I am reliably informed that you don't need to worry about foreign bacteria entering the wine, as long as it is still fermenting. Fermentation produces carbon dioxide, which being heavier than air, sits on top of the wine and forms a protective layer, which stops air from coming into contact with the wine. Just make sure you are using a bottle with a fairly thin neck, rather than a wide rimmed jar for this to be effective.

 

It's good to label the wine at this point too. Mark on the date it was produced, a brief list of ingredients including how much sugar was used, and if you're using a hydrometer, mark on the wines starting potential alcohol level. Lastly, give it a name. "Bubbly jubbly", has still not been used. Think about it.

 

 

 

Once your wine is right near the end of fermentation, it is a good idea, though not essential, to rack the wine. This is the process of siphoning off almost all of the wine into a second bottle, leaving just the bottom layer of sediment remaining (known as the "lees"). This helps to make a cleaner, better tasting wine, as the dead yeast is removed from the brew.

 

Place the wine that you want to rack on a table, or anywhere higher than the floor, that will allow the siphon to work effectively. Plan this in advance too; if you have to move the bottle then make sure you allow at least a day for the sediment to settle before the wine is racked. Place the hose about two inches from the bottom of the bottle, just above the sediment layer, and suck on the hose to start the siphon. The siphon has quite a vacuum effect in the wine, sucking from some distance in front of the tube, so in an ideal world we would use a long glass tube with a small U-bend at the bottom, which would allow the hose to suck upwards instead of down. As you get right down to near the bottom of the wine, you can gently tip the bottle to get the last of the clean wine, still being careful not to disturb or suck up any sediment.

 

The leftover sediment can then be tipped away, or actually used as the base for a soup. Dead yeast is high in B vitamins, which are good for the heart and soul.

 

Racking the wine is good practice, as it agitates the yeast, helping the fermentation process, without disturbing the sediment. You can rack a wine as many times as you want, to make an even clearer wine. Each time you do this you lose a little wine though, so at Panya once is enough.

 

 

 

At Panya we never use chemicals or detergents to disinfect bottles unless absolutely necessary. As alcohol is produced, it creates an environment which becomes inhospitable for harmful bacteria such as E-coli or salmonella. You will however end up with a scummy ring around the inside of the bottle, where the wine has been sitting at different levels, which you won't be able to reach with a brush. Throw in a few handfuls of sand and gravel, mixed with just a little water, and swill it all around the inside to remove the scummy residue. Rinse it a few times with a hose to get the last of the sand out, and then give it a final rinse with drinking water. Once the bottles are clean I've started labelling them as clean with a piece of tape, and the date they were cleaned, so they don't get mixed back up with the old ones. Nice.

 

 

 

The winery here has gone through many phases, and right now we seem to be at an all-time high of wine production. Panya has produced some fine wines over the years, which have been the driving force behind many a night of funky gyrational jiggling, and all kinds of jovial frivolity. We've had passion fruit-tamarind, ginger-chilli, banana, pineapple, galangal-lemongrass-chilli, roselle, lime, balefruit, and a whole host of other delicious beauties to delight and tickle the palette. But what next? Jackfruit wine? Mango? Durian wine? Ooh be still my dribbling tongue! And then what? Here's my thought: Each time we produce a wine here it costs about 150 baht, depending on the ingredients, and so it seems like at some stage a sensible idea would be to greatly scale up production and start to sell our wine to restaurants in Chiang Mai to start recouping our costs. This would require many more bottles, and a large platform for the wine to sit on, and could be one person's full time job. This would be a lot of work, but then maybe we could drink for free…

 

 

 

 

Chris Parker  leaningonmyspade@gmail.com