Who doesn’t like the taste of wine? When it comes to wine, everybody is fond of it.
Wine is an alcoholic beverage made with the fermented juice of grapes. In fact, wine can also be made from apples, pears, ginger, grapes, and plum.
Wine grapes take an entire year to ripen, hence the word’s origin, Vintage. Vint stands for winemaking, and Age is the time of year. Several facets explain wine’s unique flavour: acidity, sweetness, alcohol, tannin, and aroma compounds produced in fermentation.
Few places in India offer the luxury of winemaking and wine-tasting.
Mussoorie is one such place known for its wine breweries that give us exotic wines.
Making wine is one of the exciting things to learn in Mussoorie. The winemaking trip to Mussoorie is popularly known as Vinification.
Making of wine:
Ensure your equipment is sterilized and rinsed clean.
Select the grapes, and toss out rotten or peculiar-looking grapes.
Wash your grapes thoroughly.
Remove the stems, and crush the grapes to extract juice into the primary container. You can use your hands, or if you are looking for some fun, go old school and stomp your feet.
Add wine yeast. Insert hydrometer, add sugar accordingly (dissolved in water), and stir. Cover the bucket with cloth and allow it to ferment for a week or 10 days.
Strain the liquid to remove sediment and forth; fill it in containers and airlock. Allow it to ferment again for weeks. Again separate the wine from sediments and store it in another container.
Continue this process for another 2-3 months until the wine is clear. Later, store the wine in bottles. Upright the bottles for the first three days and store the wine on its side.
Some places in Mussoorie offer a workshop that teaches the process of winemaking. Trained instructors in the workshop assisted us on how to make an assortment of wines from different fruits such as grapes, apples, plums, pears, and so on.
One can have 10 jugs of select wine made by their own hands within a month. We can even get the recipe card for the winemaking process in the workshop.
Tasting some of the wine prepared by our own hands can be great fun. All you need is a glass of wine to look, smell, taste, and think. This experience will give us a peek at the European lifestyle and the history of winemaking in Mussoorie.
Enjoy this vinification experience and become a wine expert, well, at least a novice on the path to being a connoisseur.
