Making Red Wine Vinegar

Making Red Wine Vinegar
Hi, I’m Farley talking to you about wine still. Today I want to talk to you about making vinegar out of wine. I just talked about cooking with wine and how you should not use wine that has already gone bad or it’s been oxidized when you are cooking, If you have that half empty bottle or quarter full bottle of wine and you don’t want to throw it away because it seems like such a waste which I agree with, what you can do with it is make vinegar out of it. Instead of using just regular red wine vinegar that you get from the grocery store which doesn’t have that much flavor, you can make your own red wine vinegar. You can do it with white wine too but I am going to talk about red wine today. What I am going to do is get a glass jar (mason jar) and go ahead and fill it up, not too full, because this is going to be a long process. Say I put about you know that much into the glass, then you are going to take some of that expensive red wine vinegar and going to put a little bit of that in there to get it started. That is going to get it to turn. Once it is in contact with the air it is going to oxidize it more but put the top back on and then put it in a dark cupboard or pantry and leave it alone for a few days. Every few days open it up for a couple of hours and let it have contact with the air which is going to break down the wine even more. There are cultures or mothers you can buy pre-made that will start your vinegar out. I haven’t seen any of this in stores. I just do this myself. So you pour a small amount of wine, even less red wine vinegar and close it up and put it away. It is going to start to form a shiny film on top but don’t worry about that because that is normal. Once it starts to form a culture itself then you would just add more red wine to it every so often. Just keep that up in a cabinet and eventually it does take a while, but you can have your own red wine vinegar and once you really get into it, you can use that for presents and put in fancy bottles and tie it with a bow and it will be fun gifts for people to receive.