Oak Barrel Winecraft wine vinegars
It’s one of those things you generally don’t get too excited about, but a good wine vinegar can really make a big difference in a salad dressing or when cooking. While I can appreciate good wine vinegar, I’m usually annoyed by the rip-off prices you see in the supermarkets, which usually treat wine vinegar as a “gourmet” product, and price it accordingly. As opposed to plain old distilled white vinegar, which you can buy by the gallon at Costco for very little money, wine vinegars can run anywhere from a couple of dollars to more than $20 for a pint.
And so it was with great satisfaction one day that I discovered the house-made wine vinegars available at the Oak Barrel on San Pablo Avenue. Best known as a supplier of wine, beer and vinegar making equipment, the folks at Oak Barrel Winecraft also make their own label red and white wine vinegars.
No fancy lables, no fancy bottles, you can get their vinegars in 750-mL cork-stoppered wine bottles as well as 4-liter jugs. 4 liters of either red or white wine vinegar will run you less than $5. And it’s very good amber-colored white wine vinegar and ruby red wine vinegar, higher in acidity than most of the supermarket stuff. After trying the vinegars in the 750-mL bottles, I now buy the 4-liter jugs and use them to refill the 750-mL bottles I keep in the kitchen. If you’re adventurous, you can stuff some herbs, garlic or whatever into the bottles to make your own flavored vinegars, too.
Given them a try. Oak Barrel Winecraft is located at 1443 San Pablo Avenue, on the east side about two blocks north of Cedar; (510) 849-0400.
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It’s also easy to make your own. I’ve had a barrel from Oak Barrel for, oh, 3 years now? The only real problem with making your own red wine vinegar is that you pretty much can’t ever have regular vinegar again: My vinegar is several orders of magnitude better than anything I can find even on the gourmet shelves. I just dump in wine leftovers and bottle it up when it smells like vinegar. Makes for great hostess/holiday gifts, too.
I haven’t done white wine vinegar yet, though. It’s a tougher challenge because white wine has so many more sulfites, which are of course used (in part) to prevent wine from turning into vinegar. So I’m not yet spoiled on white wine vinegar.
Is it really that easy? Just dump in the dregs and wait for the smell?
@Lance Knobel
More or less but “Google” around for details, hygiene is a good idea, etc. Remember that no food inspectors are looking into your production so you’re on your own. But, basically, fermentation is fermentation and rot is rot.
Old joke, along the same lines: What can really happen to cheese/yogurt/vinegar/etc. that hasn’t already happened to it? Purification, rot, etc. – all your good friends. Get the little nasty microbes to do half the digesting work for you. Their work product tastes good.
Also, everyone in Berkeley’s intellectually snooty food culture has or should take a gander at Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen”. It’s pretty demystifying and informative on a number of topics. I forget, though, whether or not it says anything about vinegar (though I would expect it does).
-t
Pretty much. Oak Barrel sells a “starter kit” which includes a barrel, but the cheaper route is to just buy some mother (starter culture) from them, pour it into a jar, and then add wine. A friend of mine who got vinegar from me as a hostess present started her own, using my vinegar as a mother, and has been making her own vinegar for a year and a half now. No barrel, no fancy anything. Oak Barrel has a small booklet on the subject which is decent (I got my instruction from a back issue of The Art of Eating, and there’s another excellent description in the book Lost Arts).
I like to keep the wine at about 10 percent alcohol (which gets converted, almost 1:1 to acetic acid), which often means diluting it before it goes in, but Acetobacter doesn’t do too well if the alcohol gets much higher than that. You’ll want to cover your jar with cheesecloth, keep it somewhere dark but warm (Acetobacter doesn’t like a lot of light), and fill the jar about halfway. Acetobacter loves oxygen.
Wine wants to become vinegar. The only thing that stops it, really, is the sulfites. That’s why a mother is good, since it kicks off the process.
Here’s a post I wrote about it a while back.
http://www.obsessionwithfood.com/2006_05_01_blog-archive.html#114883864047391023
Per Thomas’s comment, On Food and Cooking has a wealth of information about vinegar per se, but not much in the way of practical vinegar-making tips. However, if you want to know about the chemical transformation, the different types of vinegars, the relative strengths of each, and so on, it has much to offer.
And in my opinion, OFaC is a book that every serious cook should own.
@Thomas LordAnother interesting classic book on the subject is Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz. Covers vinegars, as well as a host of other interesting foods you can make yourself, including sauerkraut, beer, breads, etc.