[Sca-cooks] Re: Good brands of vinegar

[Christiane]

***Once I was visiting in a place that did as much as possible with natural
low toxicity cleaning agents.  Our work group was assigned one of the  first
lunch cleanups.  We dutifully followed the list for cleanup and where to put
things back.  When we got to the end, we were supposed to clean all the
counters and tabletops with vinegar.  I looked in all the cabinets and all I
could find was basalmic vinaigrette.  We all looked at it and each other
thinking "surely NOT."  Then thoughts of Marie Antoinette flashed into my
mind and I said  "... hmm...Let them wash their tables with balsamic
vinegar." We all cracked up laughing and then went to find someone who could
get us some cleaning vinegar.

----Heee heee heee. If seeing my cousin Laura practically drinking the stuff made Uncle John agitated, seeing the balsamic used as a cleaner would have made him have a heart attack<g>.

>> You need a homemade wine with preservatives to make vinegar;

***Just to double check, you mean without preservatives, right?  At what
point in the winemaking process does the vinegar mother get added?

You are correct, withOUT preservatives. And the way I recall it being done, once Grandpa or Uncle John had finished a batch of wine, they'd just dump some of it into the barrel with the vinegar mother to "feed" it. They had to have the wine first. Leftover wine from Sunday dinner was also dumped into the barrel. 

Mind you, the wine and the vinegar it produced were very rough and strong. A couple of drops of the vinegar and some good olive oil, and that was the salad dressing. This vinegar was not for sissies <g>.


> Red wine vinegar in my grandmother's house was made from the infamous
"dago red" my grandpa made (my uncle took over winemaking duties when my
grandpa died. Grandpa had built the house with a cave; it had the barrels
for the wine and the barrel for the vinegar. It also had Grandpa's still,
where he made the rocket fuel, um, I mean, grappa.

***Wow, sounds like a wonderful place...a good selection of the important
facilities....  Is your uncle keeping the same strains of wine and vinegar
beasties going as your grandpa had?

I don't think Uncle John makes wine or vinegar anymore; he's had some severe heart problems. My dad took part of the vinegar mother when the contents of the cave were being cleaned out after my grandma died, but he killed it, as I've hinted, with storebought wine.

After Grandpa died, the still was shut down; but my grandma used some of the last grappa to preserve cherries. After her funeral, back at the house, we teenagers went into the pantry, found the "cherrybombs", and got royally plastered. We think Grandma would have approved. 

Gianotta