Make Wine Vinegar – Its Easy!
Wine Vinegar is a delicious way to perk up so many dishes, from sauteed vegetables to a beautiful roast in the oven. Making your own gourmet homemade vinegar is easy, and its even healthy!
Wine vinegar is made from a ‘mother’, a bacterial mass that protects the baby vinegar as it grows and develops. Don’t fret if you don’t have a vinegar mother. Any real, living (read that as ‘non-pasteurized’) vinegar will make a mother. You may even see a mother formed in the top of the bottle, or at least some ‘floaties’ in the vinegar. Most importantly, it has to be LIVE vinegar, if you are using commercial vinegar. The most popular brand of live vinegar is Bragg’s with the Mother. And you only have to use this once! After that, your vinegar will be live, and you can continue to make vinegar from your own vinegar as long as you want!
Here’s what you’ll need to get started making your own homemade, live, healthy vinegar from scratch:
Wine Vinegar
1 cup Braggs live vinegar with the mother (if you have access to any live unpasteurized vinegar, you can use that too)
2-3 glasses’ worth of any red wine (even if it has been left open, its still good for vinegar)
a glass or ceramic container that can be covered tightly, like a mason jar or a water crock
Dish towel and large rubber band
Add the Braggs live vinegar into the jar. Add the red wine and stir. Cover the jar with a double layer of dish towel (or cotton Tshirt material) and secure with the rubber band. I don’t recommend using cheesecloth for this, because the weave is too loose. Fruit gnats will be drawn to it so you want to keep it closed up. Store in a dark cabinet. Shake or stir the jar every few days. A film will form over the vinegar in about a week. This is the mother forming. It isn’t harmful or spoiled. This is the mother, protecting her baby vinegar!
After two or three weeks, when you notice the smell is more vinegar than wine, taste it. Does it taste like strong vinegar? Then it can be bottled and sealed tightly and stored to age. The vinegar is fine straight from the jar at bottling time, but it may be stronger or more harsh than expected. Aging will mellow out the vinegar tremendously. I keep a bottle that is about two years old for cooking or drizzling over desserts.
If you want to keep a vinegar going, a continuous brew vinegar is easy too. Get a larger container and simply feed the vinegar about once a week. Any time you have leftover wine, or even a bottle of wine you’d like to use, simply add a cup or two around the edges of the mother that forms and return the dishtowel in its place. You can feed it more often, just make sure the amount you add is less than half of the vinegar under the mother, and give it a little time to develop. Bottle between feedings, let it sit a few weeks without feeding so the wine will have time to turn to vinegar. Then drain off a bottle’s worth and continue feeding.
One caveat: If you ever notice a smell of lacquer or that the vinegar smells like nail polish remover, then ditch it, mother and all and simply start over.
Vinegar is so easy to make, no reason to buy those expensive vinegar store products to flavor your foods. Make your own gourmet aged vinegars!
