Our homemade wine is ready!

.
We recently bottled our first batch of wine, made from locally-grown Concord grapes last summer.  Thanks to my friend Yarn Over for walking us through the process.

It's delicious!  From this 2 gallon batch, we got over 6 bottles.

We still have a 5-gallon batch fermenting, as well as a 2-gallon batch of Cranberry wine.  We couldn't bottle this because we ran out of empty bottles.  Our dilemma was solved last Saturday during our anniversary trip.  We stopped at a local winery called Famous Fossil.  I was speaking with the wonderful owner, Pam Rosmann, and mentioned our dilemma.  I was so grateful when she offered to us some of her used bottles!  They serve a lot of wine in their beautiful winery and don't have the capacity to sanitize the bottles for reuse.  Thus, they simply get recycled.  She was glad the bottles would have a second life, and I was thrilled beyond belief when she boxed up 36 empty bottles for us! If you live near Northwest Illinois, I hope you'll visit their winery and sample their delicious wines.  The delightfully fruity blackberry wine is my favorite. If you don't live nearby, you can visit their web site at http://www.famousfossilwinery.com/index.html.  Their vineyard is certified biodynamic, which is a step above and beyond organic.  Wonderful!

We'll be busy this week washing & peeling the labels off of these bottles, then filling with our wine!  We're going to need more friends to share this wine with...

Thanks for visiting the All-Natural-Mama blog, home to Wishful Acres Organic Farm!