Watermelon Concerns + Pear Success

Matuz and his wonderful wife called me the other night with concerns about the watermelon wine. It's been sitting at his place in the secondary and he feared it had spoiled when he opened it. It was yellow and the smell was rough. I did a lot of research before I saw/smelled it myself. Research online says at this stage it's supposed to have an unpleasant odor and the red "pigment" should be falling to the bottom, leaving it looking an odd pale yellow.

Last night I checked out the watermelon wine and brought it over to my place. Yes, the smell is pretty unpleasant, but the advice I read online yesterday seems to mirror what I've read on other sites, "If you're thinking about tossing it because it smells, don't do it! It will turn out ok as long as you're sure it fermented quickly." I know it has fermented, because the hydro reading went from 1.100 to 0.900 in just over a week, so it should have a high enough alcohol content that nothing's going to spoil it.

So, my conclusion yet again is that I've got to be patient and ignore my instinct to pass judgment on the wine too quickly. The good news is that, once the secondary is open for a short time, the smell dissipates and all that is left is the wine smell.

Finally, we (the soon-to-be wife and I) made a decision yesterday to serve the 2010 Pear Wine (casually known as "Horse Piss") at the head table for toasting at our wedding reception next month. Of the wine's we've made so far, this Pear Wine has been the consensual favorite.

We have about one gallon left of the original three gallons we started with, so we're probably going to use it at the head table and then let our parents/grandparents try it. Hopefully we'll have some left after that... Until then, it's sitting in a refrigerator to keep it consistently cold. That has seemed to make the taste much more crisp over the past month or so.