Sassy Homemade Wine – Apple Wine from Fresh Apples Continued… And the Final Thanksgiving Feast Recipe – Apple Cranberry Pie

A few weeks ago I posted the recipe and starting process of making Apple Wine from fresh apples.  Today you get to seen the ‘next steps’ in that process, finally.

This is when the fermenting started:

This is the ‘must’ ready to be transferred into a carboy:

Doesn’t look quite as ‘appetizing’, does it?  I used my auto-siphon to pull all the fermenting juices from the apples:

I siphoned it into a sanitized carboy first, because I wanted to see how close I was to 5 gallons.  Then I covered a bucket with a straining bag and poured the fermenting juice through it to strain out the stuff I didn’t want to have to let ‘settle’ later:

I did that process three times to make sure it was thoroughly strained – the stuff you see in the straining bag had the consistency of fine applesauce.  Better to get it out now rather than wait for it to settle to the bottom to leave behind later.  That way I can be sure to be left with close to the four or five gallons I want to have in the end.

After the juice was siphoned off, this is what was left:

Since I needed a bit more liquid to fill a 5 gallon carboy completely, I attached a straining bag to the top of the bucket and started to ladle the apples and whatever liquid was left in the tub into one of my jelly straining cone thingys:

That way I could eek out as much liquid as possible for the secondary fermentation.  Then it was time to add it back into the freshly washed and sanitized carboy:

Topped the carboy off with an airlock and will let it do its thing for the secondary fermentation.  I’ll rack it again in about 3 weeks – there will be a lot of sediment to leave behind based on the cloudy look it’s currently sporting.  I grabbed a one-gallon carboy of last year’s apple wine that is in its final clearing stages so you can see how much different this wine will look when it gets close to being completely finished:

Notice there’s still a little bit of sediment at the bottom of the apple wine on the right – I’ll be racking that batch this week to let it clear a little more before bottling.

In case you were wondering about the wine bottles in the left part of the first picture, it’s my ‘bottle tree’.  Specifically designed to allow you to ‘drip dry’ sanitized wine bottles prior to bottling.  I sanitized some wine bottles to bottle the fresh batch of kahlua I just made:

That bottle tree can hold something like 48 wine bottles at one time.  Sure has made life easier than trying to precariously perch wine bottles for drying on the dish rack.

The Spanish Tempranillo and Wild Blueberry Blush wines are getting close to completion – I’ll probably be updating their status next week.

Meanwhile, last week I posted recipes that I make for our Thanksgiving Feast – Jan from Jan’s Sushi Bar was a wild woman the week before posting a plethora of recipes to entertain the masses and spin circles around the Spin Cycle.  She encouraged me to post my Thanksgiving Feast recipes, so I did.  If you missed them, I have them conveniently linked via this list:

Champagne Turkey
Make-Ahead Mashed Potatoes
Slow Cooker Apple Stuffing/Dressing
Slow Cooker Sweet Potatoes
Cranberry Sauce with Port and Cinnamon
Pumpkin Cognac Crème Brûlée
Apple Cranberry Pie

The only recipe left to post is the Apple Cranberry Pie.  How appropriate we’re sort of talking about apples today, so it fits in quite well.

After us kids moved out of my parents house, we would always converge on their house for Thanksgiving.  My mom would delegate what each of us should bring – pumpkin and apple pies were usually delegated to me.  My dad loves cranberries, so one year I decided to do a twist on the standard old apple pie  and make it with cranberries added – and it was a huge hit. So I’ve made Apple Cranberry Pie for Thanksgiving ever since.

1-1/2 cups	fresh or frozen cranberries (or 1 cup dried cranberries)
2/3 cup	white sugar
3 tablespoons	all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon	ground allspice
6 to 8	tart cooking apples – peeled, cored and thinly sliced
1-1/2 tablespoons	brandy (or apple cider)
1 teaspoon	vanilla extract
2	9 inch pie crusts