Do you enjoy mysteries? Sometimes, I do. It is a mystery to me how this wine I started this evening will turn out. But from the taste of the juice, it just might be very good.

Sometime ago, I purchased what I thought were 2 lb bags of gooseberries. I bought 10 lbs in all, hoping to make some gooseberry wine similar to this one. Except, what I ended up with in those five bags was nothing like the gooseberries I used for that wine. I’m not sure what I have. They do have the appearance of gooseberries in shape. But they are a very dark colour. Darker than the purple gooseberries I’m familiar with. And they were of assorted sizes. The smaller ones looked almost like overly large currants. There were some that were sweet to the taste, and some that had that tart flavor I associate with gooseberries. The juice was a very rich purply red color. I think they might have been some variety of gooseberry that I’ve not seen before, but I can’t say for sure.

I had taken all the bags out of the freezer to make up a five gallon batch, and thought… “Well, what the heck. Let’s get at it.” I know that some people put all their fruit into a straining bag – I’ve done that as well, but sometimes I’ll just liquify the fruit in a blender. Which is what I did. I heated up some water and added sugar to the hot water, in one gallon batches. Added 2 1/2 teaspoons of pectic enzyme. The total amount of sugar I added was 5 KG or about 11 lbs. The starting SG was 1.104 – but that is not exact with some of the fruity bits floating around in there. By the time I had taken the SG, much of the bits had come to the top, so I was able to get a fairly clear sample of the juice to measure the SG.

Pitched some yeast – and let’s see what happens!

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