Mother of What?? – Vinegar at Home: An Experiement

The grapes had just come off the vine and soon after we were pressing this years wine.  As the first drips came running from the press an old idea came up out of the cobwebs of my mind, maybe I should make some vinegar.

Waste Wine?? – Talk about a party-foul!

Over the years my other-half and I have made a few batches of wine.  We have made enough wine that we have some that has out lived its optimum drinking age and needs to be dealt with.  We are getting to the point where our first experiments in wine making are getting to be about eight or more years old. These first experiments were drinkable when we made them, but let’s just say that them lasting this long and still being drinkable is darn near a miracle.  It is honestly time to do something with the remaining wine and reuse the bottles for this year’s batch.  That’s when I got my idea.

Pros and Cons of an Italian Heritage

I am Italian, and am also only one generation shy of getting off the boat from Italy.  Back in the day grandfather had a farm in Italy.  My family grew up on the farm and learned all those wonderful things that Italians do.  When my family eventually moved to the United States they brought with them some of the things they used to do in Italy.  One thing they brought with them was wine making.  Some of my fond childhood memories was following my family down into the cellar of our home in New Jersey and watching them use what seemed like magical equipment to make smells that I would later learn was evidence of wine making.  Experiencing family wine making was definitely a positive part of my childhood.  Family superstitions, well that’s another story.

My family have their superstitions about of how things in the world worked.  Ever proud of their ignorance, it has been interesting to finally as an adult put a vocabulary around it all. I kind of learned to describe some of their thinking as a type of mythology similar to when the ancient Greeks had to describe how the sun moved across the sky.  The had a explanation that matched up with the way things “appeared to work” but today even the Greeks would not argue in general about how the sun moves across the sky. Even though I like the idea of a chariot pulling the sun across the sky, I have to relent and accept a more rational description of such things. In any case, I had quite a bit of relearning to do in my life some of it more painful and embarrassing than others.  This article is little bit about that relearning.

Making Vinegar from Wine – Not Just Wine Gone Bad

One of the less embarrassing lessons that I had to relearn was that vinegar was not “just wine gone bad.”

So here I have a few bottles of homemade wine that is not up to snuff with drinking.  I can reuse the bottles for storing this year’s fermented juice-o-de-grape, but I still have a tug of the heartstrings for this liquid that I had “crafted” myself all those years ago.  How can I use this stuff, other than cleaning the sink with it?  Yes, yes, … vinegar.

“Easy enough!” my family tells me, “vinegar is just wine that has gone bad!”

So, all I needed to do was let this wine go bad.

Well, with that, I smelled some superstition in the air.  I brought up my favorite web browser of the day and did some research.  It just so happens that just like some of the other mythology that has been past down from generation to generation, this “wine gone bad” description fits what is observable, but is not exactly correct.  The word vinegar actually comes from the French vin aigre, meaning "sour wine" and it is a good description of what happens when wine is left to the elements outside of a corked bottle, but it does not always turn to vinegar.  Why is this the case?

Acetic Acid bacteria – Vinegar Bacteria

Wine happens.  The grape has the most sugar per fruit than any other fruit and that little powder on the outside of that grape is yeast.  Given the right container, and you can say that wine was meant to happen.  Evolution has placed all of the right ingredients together, right next to each other, in a its own little grape package it seems just to make wine happen.  Vinegar happens too, and by accident, but the vinegar bacteria is not all places, so it is not as probable evolutionarily.

My Experiment – Is Vinegar just Sour Grapes?

To be fair I really assumed that there was a bacteria that created the vinegar, and that the making of vinegar was not as simple as my family had made it out to be.  The little detail that they had left out from their description was that each part of the family who made vinegar was given a little bit of vinegar from someone else in the family who had made it previously. Or when vinegar “accidental”, it happened in a house that already had vinegar made in it and hence they knowingly or unknowingly made making vinegar successfully more probable.

In my experiment, I knew it was highly unlikely that this bacteria was around my house.  Although I had made wine I had not made vinegar and I had doubted that any previous owners had done either. I would now try out making vinegar using wine by letting it “go bad.”  I researched the instructions for making vinegar on the Internet minus one thing: I didn’t add anything that might have the vinegar bacteria in it.  I got my sun-tea jar (it has a little spout on the bottom which makes pouring out some vinegar without the vinegar gew easier), placed my wine in, and tied a clean towel to the top, allowing oxidization to occur and bacteria as well.  I also added some store bought vinegar to it (hoping that the modern pasteurization they use on vinegars didn’t work to kill off the vinegar bacteria).  I waited a couple months and WALLA!  Nope… some really bad wine, with some really awful green mold growing on it, but no vinegar.

Dang! – Time for Experiment Number Two

So did I mention I have a FEW bottles of wine in the cellar that I can make into vinegar?

My first experiment was actually a success of sorts.  After a couple of bottles of wine, I now know that the sun is not pull by a chariot, but is really towed by a NASCAR racing vehicle.  The success of the experiment did leave me without any vinegar though. So now I need to try again, but this time I will use what I knew of science, and what we know in the modern world of vinegar to guide me.  What was it that my family was missing that might have helped me in my dreams of sour grape juice?

Mother. Well, not mine.

Mother of Vinegar – A Tradition of Sorts

So we have learned of two possible ways of making vinegar:

1. Hope that there is some friendly vinegar bacteria in the environment that we can introduce to our wine and see if we can make some that way.

2.  Get some vinegar that has not been pasteurized from the store, friend, or family, and introduce the bacteria manually.

The data missing behind my family’s description of the creation of vinegar was something they had all along even though they did not put two and two together. Often when family and friends began to make vinegar, rather than making it by accident, they were given something called “mother” from a friendly neighborhood vinegar maker to “start” their wine to vinegar, or in other words “make it go bad.”

Here is what Wikipedia currently describes “mother of vinegar” as:

Mother of vinegar is a substance composed of a form of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria that develops on fermenting alcoholic > liquids, which turns alcohol into acetic acid with the help of oxygen from the air. It is added to wine, cider, or other alcoholic liquids to produce vinegar.

Mother of vinegar can also form in store-bought vinegar if there is some non-fermented sugar and/or alcohol contained in the vinegar. While not appetizing in appearance, mother of vinegar is completely harmless and the surrounding vinegar does not have to be discarded because of it. It can be filtered out using a coffee filter, used to start a bottle of vinegar, or simply left in and ignored.

I looked to see if I could find a non-pasteurized vinegar and see if I could get some started this way.  Here we see the bottle that I purchased ready for use.  (Yay!) I bought this from a health food place on the Internet that sells vinegar “with mother” for drinking (the bottle says a tablespoon per morning).  The bottle doesn’t describe what drinking this will do for a person, and I will just leave that to you the reader as an exercise to find out for me (comment with an answer if you find one).

Experiment Two

Now I will try my little experiment again.  In the next couple days I will be using a couple more bottles of my beloved wine to see if if this bottle really has “mother” in it, and see if I can get this mother working.

Stay Tuned…

Now I’m wondering if I should make one white vinegar and one red?