I love wine. So over the last five years, I've taken classes at our local college in viteculture and enology. I've planted and propogated 220 grape vines, harvested 1.5 tons of grapes, and produced wine...not a lot...just enough to keep me happy (approximately 300-350 bottles per year).
However during my first attempt at winemaking, my wine became oxidized and tasted like cooking sherry. While it was drinkable by me and by my staunchest friends, it wasn't really worth bottling. Not wanting to waste my creation, I decided to turn it into vinegar.
I've seen several posts on food preservation and read discussions that detail what we should stock up on. One of the common items in all of these posts is vinegar. There are lot of uses for vinegar, far too many for me to list here. But because it's an important stable, I've decided to share just how easy it is to make. Afterall, once the SHTF no one really knows when the grocery store will have more vinegar in stock.
Vinegar is just acetic acid. Acetic acid is created by a bacteria...the good kind of bacteria. The bacteria turns wine into vinegar. While this process can occur naturally, it is really risky to set out an open bottle of wine and hope that it will turn into vinegar. You see, there are a lot of bad bacteria out there that will compete for the same resources in the wine as the good bacteria. If they win, you will end up with something that can harm and even kill you.
So the trick is to add enough of the good bacteria and give it a head start so that it out-reproduce the bad bacteria. It's really simple to do and once it's created, the vinegar bacteria will continue to propogate as long as you keep feeding it. Here's how to do it.
1. Get some wine or hard cider or whatever it is you want to turn into vinegar. I'd recommend 5 gallons.
2. Put it into a container (e.g. wooden barrel, carboy, etc).
3. Buy a mother-of-vinegar or see if one of your prepper friends will give you one. A mother-of-vinegar is a nasty, gelantinous blob of white stuff. It's a concentrated form of the bacteria.
4 Plop the mother-of-vinegar in the container with the wine
5. Cover the container, but make sure oxygen can get in. I use cheese cloth with a rubber band to hold it onto the neck of the carboy. These bacteria need oxygen to live.
That's it. In 3-4 months you'll have vinegar. As you use the vinegar, you can top off the container with more wine or cider or whatever. This is how you feed the bacteria. I usually pour the remainder of wine that I donn't finish at dinner into my container.
Try to keep your container in a relatively stable temperature environment. The bacteria can handle some temperature swings, but I would't recommend leaving it out on a cold winter day or in the sun on a really hot summer day. Moderation is the key.
By following this approach you can sustain your stash of vinegar indefinately. You can even cut off pieces of your mother-of-vinegar and start new containers, sell the mothers, or trade them with your fellow preppers.
There are numerous websites that go into the mechanics of making vinegar in excrusiating detail, but I wanted to share what I've learned from my experience making it and I wanted to let you know just how easy it is to do.
I've had a five gallon carboy filled with vinegar in my garage for the last two years. I've tapped it for my own consumption and drafted bottles for friends and family.
Hope this helps.
