Homemade wine vinegar, take 2

After the disastrous end to my last attempt to make my own red-wine vinegar, I was resigned to having to work with the only vinegar mother easily available to me, thereby producing a hybrid cider/wine vinegar. Being something of a purist, I figured I would start with a small amount of unpasteurized cider vinegar to a relatively large amount of red wine, and hope that the Acetobacter would take hold and produce something tasty.

But that all changed once I read the vinegar section of the recently released Ideas in Food book by chef-bloggers Aki Kamozawa and Alex Talbot. Not only do they recommend using cider vinegar to supply the mother for all the various vinegars they make – from red wine to Guinness to maple – they recommend using it in a high ratio with the base alcohol, namely, 1:1. The important thing, as they point out, is to use a live vinegar: cider because it’s easiest to find, but if you have friends who make wine vinegar, you can use a portion of their vinegar instead. (I’m tempted to treat this batch like a sourdough starter, discarding half after acetification is complete and feeding it with more red wine, to lower the ratio of cider in the final product.)

There were other points that Kamozawa and Talbot brought into sharp focus for me, as well. First was the importance of sanitizing the jar I was using for the fermentation. Last time, I simply washed it, which may account for the population of mold I ended up with. This time, I sanitized with a bleach solution (rinsing well afterward), which should give my Acetobacter a leg up. Another point was dilution: they recommend diluting only if the initial wine is above 15% alcohol. Of course, with a 1:1 ratio of starter vinegar to wine, the alcohol content I’m starting with will already be pretty low.

And finally, there’s the question of time: they recommend checking on it after just one week, with a timeframe of two to three weeks for a complete acetification. I’ll keep you posted.