Brandywine?

I’ve always liked the word “brandywine.” I don’t know that it means anything, really, other than an archaic word for brandy. It’s also an excellent name for rivers, creeks, and various places and persons in Middle Earth. Now, however, we’ve given the name to a small batch of apple wine we’re enjoying on the homestead.

Anway apple . . . brandywine? (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).

Anway apple . . . brandywine? (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).

A year ago June, I took a risk. Michelle had cleaned out the pantry, and found a couple quart jars that held juice from Charles Anway apples (see Gleaning). They were very old; when we opened them, the juice looked sludgy, dark, and uninviting. I had extra wine yeast available, so we decided to try making wine with it. What could we lose?

Had we not tried it, we would have lost the best wine I’ve made yet!

The resulting wine, tasted when young, had all the qualities we like from our other Anway apple wines. In addition, it tastedĀ even fresher, stronger, as if biting into a fresh, crisp apple, and had a lovely dark amber or caramel color.

Our careful sampling soon finished one of the two bottles we got from the batch. We hoarded the second one until Aly’s birthday recently. The intervening months had aged this bottle into something truly special. I think the alcohol may have increased markedly, giving it the flavor and sting of a brandy. Hence, brandywine. It was so good that Aly, usually abstemious other than an occasional hard cider, liked it enough to share it with us.

We’ve been carefully nursing this last bottle. It’s almost gone. We have no hope of reproducing this, unless we manage to can more juice and leave it for unspecified years before making it into wine. Hopefully, I can match or exceed it with the current and future apple wine batches. It’s a new high water mark, something to strive for!

This entry was posted in Food & Drink and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Brandywine?

  1. Angie says:

    The derivation of “brandywine” is “branded wine,” branded in the old sense of “burnt.” (As in, branding a horse.) In other words, “cooked” or processed wine, as brandy is made from distilled wine. The word “brandy” is the shortened form, because who needs extra syllables when they’re ordering a drink?
    The Brandywine river in Middle Earth is a corruption of the Elvish Baranduin, but I digress.

  2. Mark Zeiger says:

    Thank you dear! I can always rely on you for this sort of thing. I just hope it’s not making me a lazy researcher . . . .

  3. Angie says:

    I think I need to get out more.

  4. Mark Zeiger says:

    Out to the cabin you mean? Definitely!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *