Distilling garage wine!!

After bottling wine, we also put our hands to distillilling wine. Amelie had given Jose-Miguel a 10 litres alambic for his 50th birthday as one of his many hobbies is making flavoured digestive alcohols such as fig, abricot, prune, peppers, verbena to name but a few. The alambic had not yet been touched and as I had had the chance to distill plants with ELPM on a few occasions, we decided now was the time to inaugerate the new machine.

We began by distilling wine mixed with water in order to clean the alambic. We then distilled 4 litres of the wine we had previously bottled. Our first dilemma was how much of the first alcohol to pass should be discarded, we decided to do this by taste and poured off regular samples, the first alcohol had a medical aroma, which then changed to aromatic, at this point we kept what was distilled and obtained an alcohol measuring 48 degrees.