Using up leftover wine and cider – homemade vinegar

I’ve just seen a post about home pickling on one of my favourite foodie websites – A Girl Called Jack, by Jack Monroe  and it reminded me about homemade vinegar.

Now as I commented to Jack, if you are anything like me, leftover wine might seem a bit far fetched but sometimes, when you have a bottle you don’t like much or when you’ve had friends round and it all got a bit much and there’s half a bottle that really won’t keep for drinking and you don’t feel like whipping up a coq au vin, try this out – waste not want not as my granny used to say!

When I have larger amounts to use up, I often freeze it in a lidded ice cube tray.  Once it has frozen pop the cubes out into a plastic bag and you have portioned out ” a dash of wine” for any number or recipes!

But going back to the vinegar.

The first thing you will need is something called Mother of Vinegar.  This looks like a vaguely opaque jelly and until a few years ago, I assumed it was where my vinegar was going off.  But oh no, no, no, no.  That’s MoV.  It’s the bacteria and stuff that is needed to turn wine into vinegar.  I say wine but this works equally well with sherry or cider.

You can buy MoV from wine making suppliers or you can make it.  It can take a while to make but it grows quite rapidly once you get it going and then you can share it!  Quite often, if you have a fairly old bottle of wine vinegar, you will be able to get the jelly lump out of that and divide it to use in your own vinegar.

If you are going to make it, all you need to do is add some wine or cider vinegar to some left over wine in a screw top jar, give it a good swish around and then put it in a dark, warm cupboard and forget about it for 6 to 8 weeks.

Once the MoV is ready, add about a tablespoon per 250ml of wine in a sterilised bottle with an airtight lid and keep topping up with left over wine as and when you have it.

You can also add herbs and spices to your vinegar – if you’re going to do that though, I’d recommend bringing the whole lot to a slow simmer and letting it simmer for about 30 minutes.  This will probably kill the MoV in that batch, but the vinegar itself will keep much better and the herbs won’t go off.

 

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