Answering some sour questions

Mother, May I? I’m proud as a new papa these days, beaming like mad and telling anyone who’ll listen about my little bundle of joy. Baby’s doing well, thanks—about six cups, bright red and aromatic as all get out. Mother’s fine, too. Heck, she’s tough as an old boot. I’ve already got her back in the jar working on another batch. This vinegar-making stuff is not for lightweights.

If you’ve ever gotten curious enough (or, skeptics might say, obsessed enough) about your cooking ingredients to taste vinegars, you know that the quality of what’s available at most stores varies tremendously. For years, I’ve thought about taking matters into my own hands — making my own. I’m not talking about flavoring somebody else’s vinegar — though that works well, too, provided you’ve got a nice, clean, fairly neutral base. I’m talking about going the whole nine yards — starting with raw red wine and the mother (that’s what you call the bacterial colony that converts the alcohol to acetic acid). Somehow, I never got around to it. It seemed too technical, too hard. Of course, I should have known better. Look how many winemakers do it completely by accident. What pushed me into trying it was that my friend Michael Roberts did it. More specifically, what pushed me was that he did it and then gave me some of the vinegar for Christmas. I knew it was pretty good stuff because I tasted it right away—clean and fruity with a really nice berry character, in wine-speak. But I knew it was really good because it disappeared almost immediately. Normally, a bottle of red wine vinegar will last years — if not eons — on my pantry shelf. This stuff was gone in about a month. I found myself using it not only in salad dressings but for a spark in sauces, stews, even desserts. At that point, I knew I had to make my own. The first step, I figured, was to do what Michael had done — get a small oak barrel to make it in. So I went to a winemaking supply store in search of one. I don’t know if you’ve priced oak barrels recently, but the smallest they had was about $80. It would take years of vinegar-making to amortize the cost of that. There were also some really neat Tom Terrific-looking glass gizmos for making vinegar. But they were about the same price. So I started talking to the guy behind the desk. Once he realized I wasn’t going for the high-priced spread, he was a man of few words. ‘You got a wide-mouthed glass jar?’ he said. ‘That’s all you need.’ And he handed me a copy of ‘Making Vinegar at Home’ by Frank Romanowski (Beer & Winemaking Supplies Inc., $3.95). Thus armed, I headed home. After reading the instructions, I picked out three of my least-treasured bottles of red wine and dumped them into a sterilized gallon jar, adding water to fill. Alcohol converts to acetic acid in almost the same proportion, so an average wine with 12% alcohol would wind up vinegar of 10% to 11% acidity. You want it to be more like 5% to 7%, so you add between half and a third water. And then I added a tough little bit of the mother along with what remained of Michael’s vinegar, about a cup. The mother is a rubbery, dark-red bit of scum (sorry, there’s no nicer way to put it) that houses the bacteria that creates vinegar. Technically, it’s not even necessary. You can get the same effect just by adding a cup or so of any vinegar that still has an active bacterial culture — one that hasn’t been pasteurized. I covered the top of the jar with a gauzy napkin to keep the fruit flies away and fastened it in place with a rubber band. Then I put the whole thing in a dark corner of the kitchen and waited. Actually, that was the hardest part of the whole operation. Within a couple of days, I noticed some bubbles floating on top. Within a couple of weeks came a kind of thin scum, accompanied by a powerful harsh smell. Finally, the scum darkened and sank (the creation of a new mother) and the smell softened, gradually becoming sweeter and more vinegary. Finally, after about six weeks, it seemed ready to try. Cautiously, I dipped a spoon into the vinegar. There were some ‘floaties,’ but on the whole it looked clear. I tasted it and the lights went on. This was the kind of vinegar I’d been hoping for. I rinsed out a dead wine bottle with boiling water and then poured in the vinegar using a funnel lined with a coffee filter to remove any stray bits. I stuck a cork in it and that was that. What remained in the vinegar jar, I covered with another couple of bottles of wine and some more water. If you want, you can pasteurize your vinegar — bring it to 155 degrees and hold it for 30 minutes. That will stop the action of the bacterial culture which, left to its own devices, will eventually turn your vinegar into water and carbon dioxide. That’ll take a couple of years, though, and I really can’t imagine this little baby lasting anywhere near that long.