KELSO WINEMAKER WINS AWARD IN FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONTEST

KELSO -- When Gary Burford started making his homemade wines, he first sought advice from the experts -- all the "old-timers" who have a lifetime of experience at winemaking.

But he found that those experts didn't have much advice for making dry wines instead of the sweet, fruit wines they were accustomed to. So Burford had to strike out on his own.

And nearly three years later, he's got a bronze ribbon to show for his efforts. Burford's 1998 vintage strawberry wine earned a bronze medal in this year's competition of the Home Wine and Beer Trade Association.

It was his first and only entry in such a competition. And with 550 wines entered, his was one of the 365 that earned a medal.

Burford didn't enter the contest to win medals, though it is a great compliment to receive. He wanted to learn more about his new hobby -- winemaking.

"I wanted to see what I was doing and if it needed correction," he said. After some trial and error, he was just beginning to get satisfied with his wines.

When he first started making wine in 1996, he only made eight gallons of strawberry wine. One batch was a little too dry and the other a little too sweet. So Burford mixed them to make a semi-dry wine.

"I was pleased with the way it turned out," he said. But it didn't take long to drink up the eight gallons.

So he progressed to other fruits the next year. Since then he's made blackberry, wild grape, pear, autumn olive and elderberry wines.

In 1997, his strawberry wines turned out cloudy so he went to winemaking suppliers for help. And he found it at St. Louis Wine and Beermaking in Chesterfield.

Every time he called for advice, the shop owners were happy to help. They even sponsored his entry in the HWBTA contest.

After talking to them about his problem with the cloudiness, he followed their advice and the next batch cleared up, Burford said.

He quickly learned that winemaking is a process of trial and error and "you've got to experiment."

And any time his experiments failed, Burford dumped the wines into a ditch behind his house. And those first two summers, there was a lot of wine to dump out, he said.

Of the 80 gallons of wine he made in 1997, probably 50 gallons got dumped, Burford estimated.

By 1998, he bought a good book on winemaking and read it cover to cover. He learned about additives and how to correct his more common mistakes.

Finding the right balance between the good wines he wanted and the bad wines he ended up with kept Burford going back to the fields and farms around Scott County and beyond for fruit.

He often stops the car alongside a highway or county road to pick fruit -- blackberries, elderberries and wild grapes.

When you pick your own fruit, the cost of winemaking drops considerably. Burford averages $5 or $6 to cover the cost of sugar and some yeast. "And that's about what you would pay for a cheap bottle at the store," he said.

All fruit wines, except grape, require the addition of sugar water to their juice. But you don't want to add so much water that you dilute the fruit taste, or so little that the fruit overpowers the flavor of the wine, Burford said.

Preparing fruit for winemaking is also a delicate process. Most fruits need only to be cleaned and sliced, not crushed.

It takes about six months for Burford to make his strawberry wine. And a batch is currently in progress, fermenting in 5-gallon glass carboys in his basement shop.

He starts by cleaning and slicing the berries then putting them into a 5-gallon open-top container where they stay for about five days. Then he moves them to a secondary container to finish fermenting. That process takes about 45 days. After that period, the wine is racked in bottles where it sits for two months to clear. After two months pass, the wine is reracked, and sulfite is added to keep it from oxidizing.

In all it takes six months from start to finish before the wine is ready to drink. Strawberry wines have one of the shortest winemaking processes. Some other fruit wines take up to two years to age properly.

Now that he's mastered fruit wines, Burford wants to concentrate on making a dry wine at home that is comparable to something you'd find commercially, particularly one made from pure grape juice.

And he's hoping to enter even more varieties of his Burford House Wines in the 1999 HWBTA contest.