Wine
I once had a collection of wines. They weren't the best wines in the world but they were aging nicely and improving in value as they improved in taste. But when I left the United States for an extended period I left the wines with my sister, for safekeeping. She and her husband drank them all, about five cases of dessert wines and ten or twelve cases of red wines. There were some white wines, but they probably would have aged past their peak if not consumed anyway.
You can keep a white wine up to about five years before it starts to go downhill, and it becomes unpleasant to drink after about eight years. Red wines start to deteriorate at about ten years, becoming useless after fifteen or so. Dessert wines may continue improving for decades and will keep almost forever -- well, a couple of centuries, anyway. That is a very rough generalization and there are many exceptions. Some wines aren't worth aging at all, especially champaigns, rosés and early wines.
Everything I've mentioned so far applies mostly to wines made exclusively from grapes, but wine can be made from anything that has a natural sugar content, including milk.
Wine made from milk is called "koumis", and I made some once, mostly out of curiosity. It is simple enough to do: start with a certified raw skim milk, add yeast culture and mix well, cap with a wine lock device to keep the air out (an ordinary balloon works well enough), allow it to reach room temperature and wait for about four to six hours. It tastes very yeasty.
Wine made from honey is called mead. Many meads from northern Europe are sickingly sweet, but you can make a dry mead that is very pleasant.
I once met a Navy cook who made his wines out of carrot peels and tomatoes scavanged from the mess using the bulk bread yeast from the mess. He claimed it really tasted pretty good and he had an endless supply. The wine would brew for two or three days and age for five or six days, so he would have up to ten batches in various stages, making one batch each day and consuming up to two batches in a day when they were ready.
Living in Panama gave me a chance to experiment with some unusual fruits for wines. There were lots of fruits growing wild or available free that worked well and many that didn't. Citrus fruits are too acid. Mangoes are too messy to work with, althought they might have produced an interesting wine. I didn't try the really obvious ones like bananas. I didn't have much luck with raspberries but my cranberry wine was interesting (it had the curious property that two glasses would put almost anybody to sleep). But the fruit I had the best luck with was the cashew.
The cashew nut grows inside a leathery husk that contains very caustic sap. The nut must be carefully roasted to destroy the sap -- it cannot safely be consumed raw. Above the nut grows a fruit, shaped like a pear, called marañon, yellow to red in color. The juice of the fruit is very astringent and is mostly used to treat sore throats, rarely as a beverage. Since the tree is prized for the nut, the fruit is available free. It makes an excellent wine, comparable in quality to any white wine made from grapes. The wine carries none of the astringent quality of the fruit juice but does have a pleasant and moderately complex taste.
I obtained my winemaking supplies through the mail. I had plastic bags from one to five gallons of capacity, wine locks, yeasts, chemicals to sterilize the containers and juices and an instrument to measure the sugar content of the juice. I usually sterilized my juice as I blended up the fruit and mixed in the sugar, aiming for a concentration that would produce about 9% alcohol in the finished product. This is very conservative and many people try to push their wines as high as 14% alcohol, producing a sweeter, harsher product. Wines with more alcohol might age better, but I never planned to age my wines for more than 60 days anyway, with many being opened after just 30 days. Nor did I bother with trying to bottle my wines. We served them directly from the aging bags.
I'm getting ahead of myself. After the mix was set up to the proper concentration, I had to wait about half an hour for the sterilization chemical to evaporate, then add the yeast, mix well, and seal the bottle with a wine lock. A wine lock is a device with a water seal that allows gas to escape from the jug without allowing air to enter. The yeast produces large quantities of carbon dioxide as it converts the sugar to alcohol, mostly in the first three to five days (depending on temperature and the chemistry of the fruit). When gas production drops off, the wine lock is replaced with a cap. This is where a plastic bag is a real advantage: when you remove the wine lock, you can slowly squeeze out the remaining air from the bag while capping it, simultaneously keeping air from entering and giving the wine room to expand if more gas is generated. You write the date of each operation on a paper tag on the neck of the bag and, when the wine has aged enough, you find an excuse to invite people over to taste it.
It is legal to make wine and beer. You can make up to 200 gallons per household per year, I think. That's for consumption, not for sale. Four gallons per week should be enough for most families. It is very easy to make good wine, especially if you like to experiment.
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