So now I have a spare room devoted to vinegar making and have small batches of many different flavors of vinegar (apple cider, red wine, white wine, scuppernong). It took awhile to get all of these guys rolling.

Since I've never done this before and most of my questions baffle all the home brewers/winemakers I come in contact with - I'm just throwing this out to cyberland wondering if anyone knows anyone that makes vinegar. I have a million questions to asks.

I am not an expert.

Basically, first you must obtain a *mother*. The rest just takes care of itself.

I haven't tasted any of them though I've been told that I should to determine the level of acidity. It looks so slimy it will be hard for me to taste it, though I do enjoy the flavor of vinegar.

I have purchased a test kit used to test acid levels in wine and plan on testing the vinegars.

I was wondering if there is magic point when the acidity peaks and I have to dilute it to an acceptable level for salad dressing. Does the process slow down or crash if I miss this magic moment? At this point everything smells vinegar-ey (more like stomach acid-ey!).

I want to produce something from this vinegar, either salad dressing quality or meat marinade quality vinegar. If I determine that scuppernong or muscadine wine makes a decent vinegar then I will have to reproduce my experiment and magnify the amounts so that I can produce a large amount (I have access to a commercial kitchen for this phase). So its time to start thinking like a scientist test every conceivable level - hoping to develop a recipe that can be duplicated.

At this stage I am just playing with less than a gallon. And at this stage I was just testing whether a "mother" would grow - it did. In fact the wine store guys were more excited with my "mother" success than with my project. They said they had customers constantly asking for mother.

I'm looking for recipes and formulas and literature - like: what do they include to achieve the flavor of balsamic vinegar? My friend who started me down this winding road travels to Europe and brings back the most wonderful vinegars from Germany but she's never been able to find literature explaining how it was made. The books I have found just mention the long drawn out process used to increase the complexity of the flavor, without detailing what that process involves.

Know of any vinegar making books?

You may need to invest in oak barrels, and have to distil and pasturize, and have to test everything along the way at each step.

There is a ton of info on making vinegar if you use Google. You don't have to waste money on books. If you have a printer you can print out pages for future reference.

Google is how I got my info. There is a ton of info out there. A lot of the .edu sites have vinegar making. You may try contacting your local university to see if they have info. The one in my area has a home economist help line, and they give accurate scientific answers to questions about things like home canning and such. They may even have a vinegar/wine making course offered of the school near you.

I don't get too scientific - some of the fun is discovering the different nuances of each batch.

I'm sorry I couldn't be more help. I just make vinegar for my own use as a hobby. I've had some good batches and I've had failures.

Good luck and let us know how things go.

I have made a few vinegars - from a purchased "mother" and the best ones were made from Paisano and Burgundy wines - inexpensive brand - Carlo Rossi. The burgundy especially turned out very well.

Recently, I also made a white wine from Carlo Rossi Rhine wine. Oddly enough, the red wines took almost 3 months to become wine. The Rhine finished in only one month. I am at a loss to explain why.

The white wine was made to try some dilly beans preserved in a milder vinegar rather than the usual distilled type, as someone on the Harvest Forum mentioned it, and I thought it might be worth a try. I just planted beans, so can't comment on that aspect as yet.

My main concern for canning purposes, was to achieve a pH of about 5, which I did.

When the process was finished, I removed the "mother" and strained the vinegar, brought it to a boil, to kill further fermentation, and capped.

I was able to capture the "mother" to use on the next fermentation, although it colored the white wine a bit, after using it in the burgundy.

Sorry, I can't add more to this, although it is my understanding that balsamic vinegar needs to be aged in barrels - as mentioned above, in order to achieve it's robust flavor.

Good luck.

Bejay

I don't mind the whimsy approach for my own salad dressing - but the core of this experiment was to establish scuppernong/muscadine wine vinegar as a product. Which would need tighter controls and reliable flavor. I did find a few recipes for wine vinegar with measurements which will give me a good foundation.

Thanks again

I'll let you know if this whole things works. Right now I am leaning towards the herb Rosemary to flavor the apple cider vinegar. I have this thing about the herb and anything apple flavored.

Safety First in Making Flavored Oils and Vinegars.

Just copy and paste in your Search Program.

Bejay

I was at the Wisconsin Restaurant Trade Show this last week and there are usually a few booths there every year with fancy oils and vinegars. This year nada. I was hoping to chat with the makers and bring back some "trade secrets" to post. No such luck.

If we can keep this thread at the top, more people will see it, and maybe have some tips to offer, keeping this thread active.

I had always read before that indigenous American grapes do not make good wine. These grapes have quite a following down south for wines and jams.

Now I am even more excited to learn how these vinegars turn out.

Now I have to strain them and bottle them and allow them to finish curing(ageing) and hope for better flavors to develop.

bud wi - when I moved here the grapes were just ripening and I could barely control myself. The place I worked had an entire row of about 15 cultivars - each with its own distinct flavor and ripening time. You can actually get a headache from the sugar content if you eat too many of them. I started trying different recipes with them which disgusted the locals. They claimed that the only reason people grow them in their back yards is for home made wine.

The local wineries that use them produce wine that is very sweet - kinda like Japanese plum wine.

If folks are interested I'd love to restart this conversation. IE, do any of you use oak chips? What about ramping up production so by next year I'd have gifts?

--Lisa

The cider vinegar (from a bottle of Braggs + bottle of cider) has already formed a 1/4" thick cap. I had to move it to another container so the cap dropped, but another is already forming, two days later.

The white wine vinegar (purchased MoV + sulfite free Chardonnay) is getting that haze that says a mother is on it's way.

The red wine vinegar (purchased MoV + sulfite free Cabernet) is barely doing anything.

I know I have months to go, but all my reading said the white would take forever and the red would take off.

Funny how working with food is always a surprise!

--Lisa