One of the surprise hits was this Sangria, that came about because the White Merlot we made was kinda weird at bottling time--so we decided to turn it into Sangria!
We started with the cheapest White Merlot kit we could find, and of course I didn't make it according to the instructions. I boiled and chilled (using my copper immersion chiller) about 4-5 gallons of water (our tap water is pure enough that it isn't filtered, so it can contain small amounts of all sorts of bugs/fungi) with some yeast nutrient. I added that to the concentrated must, and for yeast, I had grown a starter of harvested T-58 in 1/ gallon store white grape juice with an additional quart of water (so 3 quarts total). I added the full, actively fermenting starter to the reconstituted must.
Then I left it alone for about a month. After that month (I did at least keep temps fairly stable for the first week or two, around 65-68*, but after that I just let it sit at ambient), I added bentonite to try and get it to clear and moved it to my fermentation fridge (just a 30 bottle wine fridge) at 40* to clear...but not for too long, as I ended up needing it to ferment something else.
It didn't clear that much, and it tasted a bit...odd. Possibly just because it was still young, but at this point, Thorn and I decided to turn most of it into Sangria.
We had some dried cherries and we had some Thai Basil growing on the balcony, so we bought some Knudson's Organic Cherry Juice (because that's what the grocery store had) and decided to turn it into Cherry Basil Sangria!
We have some 4 L Carlo Rossi Jugs, and we had 4 that were unoccupied at the time...so I took my giant pyrex measuring cup, and mixed up 16 oz cherry juice, 4 oz honey, 1 ground camden tablet and some potassium sorbate. Mixed it until everything was dissolved and poured it into one of the jugs, added a long spikey stem of Thai Basil (we had a lot that was juuust about to flower, to the point that the top of several of the plants were just barely starting to flower), a handfull of dried sour cherries and topped up with the White Merlot. I repeated that for the remaining 3 jugs and put the rest of the wine into 1 L bottles.
There wasn't a lot of wine left, so I suspect that I didn't actually reconstitute the wine to the appropriate strength, and the Sangria DID end up pretty strong when it was served at the wedding. It was a HUGE hit, and interestingly enough, it cleared WAY more in the 4 L jugs than the wine did, leaving a TON of sediment in the bottom of the jugs (some of which I'm sure was introduced by the organic cherry juice).
We've had more than a few requests to make it again, so I currently have a batch of the White Merlot going, and some Thai Basil growing. I'm sure it won't be quite the same, but it should still be great...or so we hope!
