sour grapes - home made vinegar

High quality vinegar is hard to find on the shelves yet easy to make at home, and it’s a great way to use up leftover bottles of red.

The best hand-crafted vinegars have all the complexity of great wines. You can make wonderful robust vinegar to your taste by starting with good wine. You only need a few drops of our full strength Shiraz vinegar to wake up your taste buds. The sour acid hit brightens sauces and salads, adding piquancy to both sweet and savoury dishes.

Vinegar can occur naturally when wine is exposed to oxygen, but if you want to kick start the transition add a bit of vinegar that has an active Mother.

For guaranteed success it’s best to start with low alcohol wine, around 5 per cent, you can use a bottle of 14 per cent Shiraz just dilute with a couple of bottles of water.

Half fill a jar with your red wine, allowing plenty of air space; then add the wine-vinegar at a ratio of about 5 to 1. Cover the jar lightly allowing ventilation while keeping out insects, just a few loose layers of cheesecloth, Chux, wax paper, or tin foil will do the job.

Let the bugs go to work, a lively colony of Acetobacter convert alcohol into acetic acid, that’s your vinegar.

Use a clear jar so you can see the Mother growing, it’s mesmerising to watch as one layer forms and gently drops to the bottom, then another layer forms. First thing you’ll see the wine mixture becoming hazy, then after a few weeks a thick glutinous skin will gradually develop on the surface, this is ‘the mother of vinegar’ a fascinatingly slimy smooth mass of cellulose that develops the distinctive flavour characteristics.

Store the jar in a warm position, roughly 25 degrees Celsius away from sunlight, for a few months. We keep ours in a tin shed, far away from where we make wine.

Just how long the conversion takes depends on conditions such as strength of alcohol, active mother and temperature. We’ve had cider vinegar turn in a month while red wine sat lingering over six months before reaching the vinegar stage. Taste as you go, it’s ready when you have a clean distinctive vinegar aroma and flavour. Now your batch is ready to strain and bottle. Keep the Mother for starting your next batch. Avoid spoilage by keeping everything clean during the process, and when bottling either pasteurise or fill the bottles very full to avoid an air gap.

Once you’re in the swing of it, you can keep making vinegar easily by adding some of your active vinegar mixture to any leftover wines. As you become addicted to the full flavour of your own home made brew, you’ll want to experiment with different wine varieties, strengths, blends, and maybe start some white wine, cider and sherry vinegars.

Store your vinegar like wine in a cool dark spot, and like a good wine it will improve with aging, mellowing and rounding out the flavours after six months or so in the bottle.

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