I Made Fall in a Wine Glass 🍎🔥 | The Perfect Apple Pie Wine to Share This Fall

Welcome to the channel and today we start one of our I don't want to be called a series or just a couple of wines that I'm going to be making I start this time of year and usually I start earlier but for fruit wines it's okay I'll kind of explain why looking for holiday type ready wines and meads and things of that nature and today we're going to be doing one of my favorites this is actually we're going to be tweaking it a little bit but this is going to be like an apple spiced pie kind of inspired wine we might even get a little bit of a pumpkin pie even though there's no pumpkin just because of the ingredients that we're going to be using but we're looking for that nice fall kind of flavors here coming towards like Thanksgiving and the fall time so even though we're in summer right now and outside it's 103 degrees by the way It's ridiculous. So what are we going to do here? So we're going to start with an apple base. This is a nice clean apple. Last time I made one of my apple wines, I used a Honeycrisp Apple Organic, but it was like full Honeycrisp Organic, totally murky, and it was really hard to clear out. So this time we're going with just Whole Foods Organic Apple. We're going for one gallon today. So two of these, 64 and 64 is 128 or one gallon. In terms of our apples, we are using Honeycrisp Apples. These are from last season. You can already see that juice in there. And that's because these have been frozen for like a year. And I just thawed them out. We're also going to crush them up a little bit with our sanitized crusher. Shouldn't take much because they're very, very soft. So we don't need to bust out the bigger crusher today, thank God. That'll be easy. And we got five pounds total there, if I didn't say that. Now, on the table here, these are all things that are reminiscent of fall. When somebody drinks this, I want them to think it's fall. Maybe the leaves are changing. It's crisp outside. It's nice. Family, friends, Thanksgiving is coming. All of those things is what I want someone to have the experience with. Now we may fail horribly how we say that but that's what I really put a lot of effort into sitting down to actually make my particular recipes here. First off, none of these are going to be going in today, all these are going to be going into secondary. I just wanted to talk about them briefly. We've got some nutmeg, we've got our cinnamon sticks, we've got our cloves, a little bit of ginger root. I know this sounds a little bit weird but trust me on this one. And then we've got some allspice here and hiding back here we've got some Madagascar vanilla beans. That's what we're going to be using to build our flavor profile for our apple spice kind of inspired pie wine here. And those are going to go on the secondary but we're going to move those out of the way for a second. and talk really quick about our additives this is nothing new if you guys have seen the channel before i'm going to breeze through them really quickly we've got one gram of our wine tannin give us a little bit of structure 0.6 grams of fermented K that's going to be our nice yeast nutrient we've got one campden tablet because we are going to add in a little bit of sulfite today and wait 24 hours to put in our yeast to kind of clean up our must any kind of microbial issues that might be in there get rid of any wild yeast with those apples i've got a half a teaspoon of a mixed acid blend And I've got a half a teaspoon of pectic enzyme that's going to really help break down those apples, the cell walls and get all that juice out of it that we really want. The next thing we're going to do, though, is we're going to pull out our fermentation bucket here, our two gallon fermentation bucket, all sanitized as well. You can see it's still kind of dripping there. That's going to be our must bag for apples. I'll set that over there. And we're going to pour in. Make some room here and we're going to pour in our apple juice. This is golden beautiful freaking apple juice. I always, colors, one thing about making wine and mead that I guess I'm a weirdo maybe in that way, maybe that's why I like making wine and mead, is I love colors, smells, experiences. I really just kind of enjoy I guess mother nature as a whole so when it comes to the process. So here's going to be our first 64 gallons of our apple juice going in. All right and here's our second 64 ounces for our 128. We should really have no problems once we get our five pounds of apples in here. We should be good to go or maybe like close to the lid but a little bit of space for our fermentation to take place. Please. Oh. Well, if you want apple, that's apple. That's very apple-y. I've never had, this is from Whole Foods, 365 Whole Foods Market, the organic apple. One thing with this, if I didn't mention it already, which I don't think I did, is there is absolutely no preservatives in here, no potassium sorbate, no sulfites, nothing like that, benzoates, anything like that. This is just organic apple juice from concentrate and a little bit of ascorbic acid, which isn't gonna hurt anything at all. All right, so let's get an initial ABV. Let's see where we're at. I'm thinking for this wine, About 12 and a half to 12 to 12 and a half percent. I would like a nice kind of alcohol relaxed, not too forward, but still in that alcohol range to give it a little bit of oomph. So let's see how much sugar we're going to have to add to actually get that. All right, so just by itself, it's just over 6% ABV. If we were just to ferment it alone, or about 1.048 just by itself, or about 5% to 6%. So we want to go up quite a bit here. I'm going to do some math, and then we're going to throw in some sugar. Essentially, it's going to be 10 grams per one point per one gallon. So if you kind of do the math there we'll figure out where we want to be and then we'll come back and I'm going to put it in and I'll tell you exactly what it is. All right so it's going to be about a 48 point increase to go up to about 1.096. That's what we're shooting for. That would give us about 12.59 percent somewhere in there. We're going to go with 480 grams. This is just white cane sugar here. All right 480 on the dot. Let's go ahead and set our sugar off here. Get our stirring wand and get this stirred up. All right, so that 480 grams, I got it all stirred up here, so don't waste your time. 1.092 or 12.07%. Perfectly fine, I'm not gonna add anything else. I think that's gonna be just fine. We're gonna get in our additives just real quick here, and then we're going to crush up our apples, get them into a must bag, get it tied off, and get it all mixed in together. Oh man, this smells great. I love aromas in the winemaking, mead making business. Love it. All right, those are nice and mixed in. Let's go ahead and get our apples crushed up. All right, so what we're going to do is just crush these. They're already really juicy and pretty broken down, so we're going to have to destroy these. I'm just using this. It's really easy. You can see all that nice apple juice coming out. Tomorrow, before we add in our yeast, we're going to let those sulfites sit in 24 hours. We'll take another ABV reading, and we'll make sure that we add in enough sugar to get back up to that 12%. But that was just kind of an... I call that the initial ABV setting. The real one is going to be tomorrow. After we get all of our fruit in and it dilutes, uh, the juices go in and dilute that overall must. All right. I think we're good. Let's go ahead and get our must bag. All right. Look at that perfect fit for fermentation. We've got those apples in there. This I'm so excited for that. I think this is going to be falling a freaking glass. So we've got our zip tie here. I'm going to go ahead and take this must bag, pull it up. Put that down, get it tied off, and get our zip tie on. All right, so there you go, the zip tie is on, that silicone reusable zip tie in our must bag. Keeps all those apples in. This smells great, guys. Look at that color. Oh yeah. That's nice. So we're going to wait 24 hours and then we'll come back. We'll add in our QA23 over there. Probably just going to rehydrate it or sprinkle it in. We're not going to do a whole yeast bomb. There's not a ton of fruit here. We've got plenty of yeast. We'll be putting in two and a half grams of our QA23, which is going to be half of that packet over there. All right. 24 hours. We'll see you then. All right. It's been actually a little bit over 24 hours and I've got two and a half grams of our QA23 yeast here. We're just going to go ahead and sprinkle this in here. Here, try to push the... Must bag down just a little bit. Try to get it into the actual liquid here. What we're also going to do is just kind of push this down as well. I'm just going to get that in there. There we go. And I'm just going to give this a little bit of a poke around here. Not really getting it too crazy. We're just kind of getting the yeast into the must. And then we'll let it do its thing. Doesn't have to be stirred up too nuts right now. All right. There we go. We're going to stir this for the next five or six days. Keep an eye on it morning and night. Give it a nice smell. Make sure we've got no off smells or aromas or anything like that. And in about 24 hours, we'll add in our first addition of Fermaid O. Give it a little bit of yeast nutrient. And then a little bit after that, when we get maybe about 72 hour marks somewhere around there, we'll check it out. We'll get about a third of our sugar depletion. But all right. There we go. We'll come back then. Okay. So it's been Basically 24 hour, we're at 23 hours actually, since we add in our yeast here. Gonna move this to the side. You can see we have a nice, solid fermentation. All the signs of a good, nice fermentation. We're gonna go ahead and add in our half gram of our Fermaid O, our first, or I guess our second addition of a yeast nutrient, the first one being the Fermaid K. Look at that, that's a nice, solid fermentation. Now we're just gonna kinda wipe the sides. of our fermentation bucket with our must bag here just kind of keep that wet keep it inside of the must I know that sounds counterintuitive uh but trust me we don't want it to dry on the sides of the fermentation bucket there we want to keep everything nice and wet uh then we can have some microbial issues or something where to dry on the side there it looks gorgeous looks great smells great i can smell the apple from here i'm gonna go ahead and just dump in our using our Fermaid O now, see if I can push this down and hold the camera with the other hand. There we go. I'm just actually holding it. There we go. So we got a half a gram of our Fermaid O. I'm just going to give that a little bit of a mix. Get that nice and incorporated in there. It'll dissolve on its own anyways, but there we go. All right so now what we're going to look for is about 72 hour mark usually we'll hit our one-third of our sugar depletion in wine it happens about 72 hours in mead it can happen a little bit later but let's see so we'll come back one-third of a sugar depletion and get another round of our Fermaid O in and keep on trucking until we get dry. Okay so it's been 10 days and we are dry with our apple spice here. This is at 1.000. What we're gonna do is add in, go ahead and add in some bentonite. This is just one teaspoon of bentonite with about a little less than a half a cup of hot water. Nice and mixed up there. We're gonna add that in, start the clearing process. We're also gonna add in our spices today. So we've got two sticks of cinnamon. We got 15, we have two sticks of cinnamon. We have 15 cloves with 15 allspice berries. Kinda just cracked up in there. I just used a, Potato smasher, just to crack them up just slightly. We've got two Madagascar vanilla beans that are just split sideways. We've got about a teaspoon of our ginger and about a half a teaspoon of some nutmeg. So we're gonna go ahead and get that in. We're gonna put that into our muslin bag that's been sanitized. Whoops, the only reason that it is brown is because I split the Madagascar vanilla beans on top of it, so I didn't cut the table here. So that's one reason that's brown, but it is nice and sanitized. So let's get our bentonite in, get that mixed up, and then we're gonna get our spice bag in and get everything in to start spicing this up. All right, so all of our spices are into our little muslin bag here, our mini muslin bag. And what we're gonna do is just a tiny little. Aerated hole there what happens is there's still some residual CO2 and you can see it right there on the carboy there and this will just float so we want it to actually kind of sink a little bit or be kind of weighted in there i don't i'm not going to put any kind of weight in it like stainless steel or brass or anything like that to weight it down if i had some glass marbles i might put it in to kind of weigh it down to the container but i don't have any at the moment so i'm just going to cut a little bit of a hole there that lets a little bit of an air escape it will also let a little tiny bit of the spice kind of come out But that's okay, we're gonna clear that up anyways. Not a worry, it'll keep 99% of it in there. So let's go ahead and get our spices into this nice apple spiced wine here. There we go. Get it all nice and soaked in there. We'll come back and we'll see how long this is gonna take to actually integrate. Go ahead and put the lid on. Seal it up and let it do its thing and I'll let you guys know how long it takes At least for my preferences to get that nice bit of spice in there. Okay, so for our apple wine here It's been ten days We've been sitting with our spices and there's definitely the allspice the clove that is all coming through I'm gonna go ahead and take this out. The only thing that's not really coming through as much as I hope that it would And that is going to be the vanilla. So you can see I've got some Brewer's Best vanilla sitting over there. And this is a really good one. Not all of Brewer's Best is great, but this one actually does work really well. I've used vanilla from them several times and it works really nice. And we have one ounce here. Recommendation from Brewer's Best is usually going to be one ounce per gallon is what we have here. So I'm going to go ahead and throw in one ounce. I think that's going to be plenty and let that sit for a bit. Just kind of incorporate into the wine there. And we'll see how that comes out. So a little bit of that vanilla apple pie-ish kind of flavor in there. I don't even know if there is vanilla in apple pie, but I know that I usually use ice cream when I eat it. So why not throw in a little bit of vanilla, give it a little bit more of a pop. I'll let that sit for a little bit. And then we're actually getting pretty clear here. So after another week or so, I bet we're going to be ready to back sweeten this up and bottle. All right, I'll see you guys then. Okay, so we have our apple spiced wine here. I've got some other wines on my table. table here and that's because I'm going to be doing some other video work and getting some other stuff ready. We have our peach nectarine backyard wine here from our local neighborhood and then we have a Sauvignon Blanc here from Lodi, California I believe it is. All right so we're going to do is go ahead and work on the apple wine. Now I've already went ahead and racked mine you can see we got crystal clear there. Nice. So I'm going to go ahead and get this prepared for our bottling. It's going to be coming about 24 to 48 hours. Right here, I've just got a half a teaspoon of our pectic enzyme. That'll just go straight in there. That's going to prevent any further fermentation once we add in some sugar to back-sweeten this. Because right now, this is super dry. I think it's like 0.994, 0.996 in that range. Then we've got 0.44 to 0.50 of potassium metabisulfite powder. If you had Campden tablets, all you would need is just one tablet. That would do the exact same thing. We're going to go ahead and get that in there. And that's going to help. Save us against, that's going to help work against oxidization. It's going to stabilize our overall wine here. That's going to incorporate really easily. So we'll give that a little bit of a stir, make sure that it gets mixed in there well, and then we'll come back when it's time to bottle. All right, here we are on our bottling day for our apple spiced wine here. And this really is reminiscent of like that apple pie vibe. And you see these small bottles here. These are 12 ounce bottles. That's because I'm going to be giving this away as gifts. So it is August 30th, 2026 today. So we're coming up on fall in the future and I'd like these to sit and bottle for a while. It's actually fine where it's at, but I'd like these to sit and bottle for a while so that by the time fall rolls around, that fall time, Thanksgiving, stuff like that. We're going to talk about, I have a little bit here. This is super dry right now, 0.994. We're going to sweeten it up a little bit. I've got 150 grams of sugar here. A good little bit of a sweetness to start with, but here's the dry. And so these little 12 ounce bottles, these are perfect because what we can do is when we give these away to friends and family, one, they look nice. They look fancy. They See, they got the heavy bottom on them. Uh, and they're not really that expensive on Amazon, but these are like perfect two, five to six ounce servings in a coffee mug. And why I say that is because I think this is going to be the way that the spice came out in this. I think this is going to be really good warmed up in those cold weather months. Uh, I think that's going to be great. Maybe even into the winter, like two coffee mugs, five to six ounce pour in there about 120 to 140 degrees somewhere in there. Uh, and I think this is going to be really nice that way. Maybe a stick of cinnamon, uh, but let's just get into the tasting for right now. This nice dry one. So right on the nose, it's fall. Matter of fact, when I let my daughter smell it for the first time, she said it's like fall in a glass and 100%. So I get a little bit of cinnamon, get a little bit of allspice. The allspice, the cinnamon, the clove are working really well together. I was really worried that the allspice was going to kind of like take over the show. And it's definitely present, but it's super nice. Nice spices on the front end. A little bit of that cinnamon, a little bit of clove in the taste. You definitely get a little bit of the acidity there. It doesn't leave the mouth right away. The apple is set behind a little bit with the spices, but overall, very nice, very balanced. So 12.85% and 3.67 on our pH is what we ended up here. I think that's a pretty nice representative of this apple wine here. Seriously, that's fall in a glass. I'm really excited to serve this kind of warmed up, a little bit sweetened up a little bit. Maybe even when it's warm, add a little bit of honey to it even. I think that would be nice. So let's go ahead and get our initial 150 grams of sugar in. We're about 0.85 gallons, 0.90 gallons, not a full gallon, but pretty close. So 150 grams should do a nice bit of sweetening, but not overly sweet. We'll get that nice and mixed up. And I'll tell you guys the final specific gravity or the final, final gravity. That way you kind of know where I sweetened it to. But obviously this is all about taste test right now and your particular flavors that you like, how sweet you like it, how dry you like it. Maybe you don't add anything at all. If you don't add anything at all, I would still sulfite it, but you won't need the potassium sorbate because you don't have any sugars left there for the yeast to ferment. So we'll get this nice and mixed up, give it a taste test. And it's clearing up really nice. This came out really super clear. So really, really nice looking. I can just imagine this like, the way I picture this is like, and you're going to see the name on my label here that I came up with, because I think it's really representative of what. This is going to be good when experience wise, cold weather, sweater, warmed up in a mug, maybe a cinnamon stick and just sipping on it, having a, in an early morning with the family, maybe on fall time or around Thanksgiving or, you know, somewhere around there. I just really picture that. And I kind of get excited when I think about the, I kind of get excited when I think about like the ways in which the wines can be enjoyed family and friends. As a matter of fact, this weekend, my wife and I were having a glass of wine. And I have bottles out all over the place to friends and family. And I had two different friends, one that was enjoying the vanilla muscats that we made a vanilla Moscato, one that was enjoying the Merlot that we made a while back. And both of them were having a good time and just enjoying the wine with their friends and their family and, you know, shoot me a text message and just say how much they liked it and how much they were having fun with it. And that's what it's all about. Honestly, that's what this whole thing is about. Let's see what our a little bit sweetened up apple wine tastes like get the lid back on here all right also i bet you it brings out the apple a little bit more usually sugar does bring fruit forward a little bit more nice man this smells so good i don't want to say it smells like a candle because that's that kind of like turns it off a little bit but those fall candles when you walk in and you're like oh this smells like fall cinnamon spices that's kind of what i'm getting here i don't get much of the vanilla although we did add in some vanilla there maybe just a slight bit, let's see, it might be reminiscent somewhere Somewhere there in the nose. Well, let's see what it tastes like. Nice. That barely sweetened it just a little bit. Now I can just tell there's some residual sugar in there. It's nice. It's not overtaking the acidity yet, but it's very close. I don't want to pop the sweetness over the acidity. That's super nice. Let's go ahead and add in another 125 grams of sugar. And let's see. I bet that's going to be where we're going to stop. Because warmed up, these spices are going to come out a little bit even more. So let's see here. Just regular old A little white cane sugar here. I'm going to go in with 100. And 20 grams of sugar is what we're going to do. Actually, you know what? We'll stop right at 100. That way we don't overshoot the sweetness here. Let's see what that gives us. There we go. All right, let's get this mixed up and incorporated. All right, let's give it a little bit of a taste test. And let's see where we're at with our sweetness here. So we're at 250 grams right now. Yeah. That's, ah, I love it. But it just, it really is freaking falling glass. It's like you just stuffed the season of fall in here. All right. I think that's nice. That's where I'm going to leave it. The apple just popped through just a little bit. The acidity is still there. Let's see here. The apple's on the tail end there. It's kind of like in the middle to the tail end. There's no astringency. There's no off flavors. Let me give you a taster experience here. On the front end, spice, a little bit of that cinnamon. I may be catching some vanilla, but I'm not sure. It might just be in my head. The apple's on the tongue right in the middle. And as it kind of goes down, I get that nice fall flavors. There's no retro nasal alcohol coming back up. The alcohol is definitely there, but it's not like kind of it's not that burning effect. It's just a nice kind of level round alcohol. Nice, which is good because when we warm it up, it'll give a little bit of a different flavor profile. So, there we go. Let's take a final gravity here and use my giant thermometer and graduated cylinder yesterday for the hundredth time. If you guys don't have extra hydrometers of what you like to use, That's one of my biggest pieces of advice. I have broken so many. I can't even tell you how many I've broken. And I broke one of my favorite ones yesterday. I thought I had a backup, my little shorty, but I didn't, so I had to order some more. So we're gonna be using this one today. And one thing to mention as I'm doing this, you wanna make sure you calibrate your hydrometers. It's very important. My other one was spot on. It was perfect. This one I calibrated it yesterday and it actually reads too low. So two points low. So whatever it says, It's actually two points higher than whatever the hydrometer reads here. That's why it's important to kind of calibrate it. So let's see where we're at on our final gravity here. All right so we're at 1.024 which means plus 2 would be 1.026. 1.026 is our final gravity for our apple spiced wine. 1.026. So we went from We went from 0.994. And so if you want to add in that six plus another 26, that would be 32 points of total sweetness increase is what we landed at here with this. Let's go ahead and get this into the bottles. You're going to love the way these bottles look, I think, whenever they're all said and done. And then I'll show you the labels. We'll get this video wrapped up. If you are searching for that fall wine for friends, this is definitely going to be it. I think either chilled and or warm. This is going to be really good. All right. Let's get this in the bottle. All right. There we go. We're all bottled up with our 12 ounce little shorties here. I think they look awesome. They just kind of give it a nice little kind of elegant look, I guess you could say. So there is our sweater weather. This is our spiced apple wine. It's sweet, but just sweet enough. We're at 12.85%. And just check it out. There's the label. I got a nice little fireplace in the background with some fall leaves and an apple. It perfectly represents what's in the bottle. And in the back label here, show you guys. This is just going to give us the information about how to warm it up, remove the cork. You want it about 140 to 150, about how long it takes in a standard microwave, serve it in a mug, or chill it and enjoy it. Either way, made for cold nights and good company. So this is likely going to be one. I like it so much. That's the Sandia Mountains here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with the Z symbol for New Mexico. But I like this so much, I'll probably even add this into our commercial winery menu. But this one is just for family and friends, so they get first dibs on it. But pretty cool. If you guys got something out of this video, please hit that like and subscribe. It really does help me out. Just trying to grow the channel here. Look at that. It looks absolutely beautiful. And until the next time, cheers.