Still Life with Garlic and Red Wine Vinegar, Julian Merrow-Smith, 1998.
This past August, sometime in the middle of the hot month, my vinegar mother died. That was the gelatinous lump of good bacteria that had formed in the bottom of my vinegar jar and produced excellent vinegar from red wine odds and ends for 18 years. The wonderful vinegar mother had been created, after several failed attempts, at a house my husband and I rented, along with a ton of other people, in Riverhead, Long Island. We were a sometimes high-strung, volatile group, so I often looked for escapist projects, and making vinegar, along with constructing spun-caramel domes, and growing wild Calabrian mint, was one of them.
I first tried making vinegar by simply pouring wine into a mason jar and leaving it on the porch, lightly covering the top of the jar with a slashed-up cloth so it got plenty of air. If there was active yeast in the wine, the enzymes in the atmosphere would help form a mother. My grandfather used to do this, so I knew it could work. Mine didn’t. The wine just soured, and no Jell-O lump developed. A lively red wine vinegar mother looks like a slab of raw calf’s liver, so that’s what I was waiting to see. Over-pasteurization or crappy Long Island air could have been the problem.
Coincidentally, around the time I first began my vinegar making project, I happened to purchase a copy of Giuliano Bugialli’s Classic Techniques of Italian Cooking, a book of traditional, proper, mostly Tuscan recipes, which also includes photos that look like they could have been shot in Renaissance Florence. It shows you how to reconstruct a cooked, boned pheasant, feathers included. Fascinating, but unless I’m hired as a food stylist for a movie on the life of the Medicis, I’m not sure I’ll ever bother. One thing in the book that was extremely interesting to me at the time was Bugialli’s advice for making homemade vinegar. Adding the crumbled insides of a slice of good Italian bread to the wine will introduce yeast that can help form the mother. That’s what Mr. Bugialli said, and wouldn’t you know, it worked like a dream. I was so excited that I couldn’t stop talking about it, producing much above-it-all eye rolling from most of my housemates. But I was making the best red wine vinegar I had ever tasted. When the summer was over I took my precious vinegar jar back to the city with me, no regrets.
Being my first and only vinegar mother, it was special to me. And when this August, after so many years of faithful service, I first noticed a buildup of brown, crystallized crud around the lid of my vinegar jar, I became worried. But the vinegar still tasted good, so I didn’t sweat it. Then a few weeks later, to my horror, I saw that the mother had completely broken up and disintegrated, leaving what was now a jar of dark, murky, almost opaque liquid that smelled like nail polish remover. I was heartbroken. I came to the conclusion that my stifling hot August kitchen had been just too much for the grand lady, so she had expired way before her time. I should have prevented it, but since she had made it through 17 city summers unruffled, I hadn’t put much thought into this past year’s intermittently broiling weather and my excessive use of grill pans and other sweltering cooking techniques. I puttered around the Internet looking for remedies, trying a few suggestions such as adding broken spaghetti or sugar to the jar, but the thing was too far gone. I could have just started fresh right away, attempting a new vinegar mother with new bread and new wine, but this was the original, a highly sentimental thing for me. I struggled to bring her back to life, but nothing worked, so I finally threw the murky mess down the drain and decided I needed a period of mourning before starting up again.
In November I happened to be making dinner at my mother’s apartment (not my vinegar mother’s, my biological mother’s). While dressing a salad with a little bottle of vinegar she still had from my last batch, before tragedy had hit, I noticed that her bottle had formed a vinegar mother of its own, a mother spawned from my original vinegar mother, probably because some alcohol or excess sugar had been left in the batch. There it was, a dark red gelatinous disk at the bottom of her decanter. Well, needless to say, I was ecstatic. “Can I have this?,” I asked my biological mother. “Be my guest,” she said, not really understanding what I was asking her for. So I poured what remained of her vinegar into another container, hurried home with my mother clone, and immediately began setting up a new jar, hoping it would take and knowing that if it did, my original vinegar mother would live on.
Here’s a good looking, live red wine vinegar mother.
I topped it with half bottles of Nero d’Avola and Côtes du Rhône wine and let it sit near the window, a place that was pleasantly cool but not drafty. After about two and a half weeks I began getting whiffs of a good vinegar smell when I entered the kitchen, but a closeup sniff told me it wasn’t quite there yet. After another week I smelled it again, and it seemed perfect. And the taste was beautiful, exactly as it had been. Hallelujah. My vinegar mother was resurrected. I’ll never neglect her again.
Erica De Mane 
Erica…jesus, you learn something every day! I had not idea how vinegar was produced. RIP to your old vinegar mother and bono fortuno to the new. Another eye-opening post. May I have the thing in the accompanying photograph for a liver transplant? We could at least try…my own is shot to hell.
Michael, I don’t think the vinegar mother will work for your ailing liver, but you might try milk thistle. I’ve heard it really works well for former and present day boozers. I use it myself and I have to say, I’m not as green as I used to be.
Just when we think we have everything we needed from Mom…little do they realize the surprising requests that can come from their daughters.
Loved this post. The educational part was certainly a bonus.
Your blog has been a pleasant discovery. Looking forward to more of your shared adventures. ;o)
Flavourful wishes,
Claudia
I’m not sure it was the heat that killed your mother. Probably best to keep it cool anyway, but i suspect she got infected by some “bad’ bacteria. Since it smelled like nail polish remover there might have been contamination by a bacterium that converts alcohol (or acetic acid?) to acetone.
George, That might be so and I’m sure there’s plenty of bad bacteria floating around my kitchen.
Foodessa,
So glad you like my stuff. And a happy New Year to you.
George, Maybe my mother developed diabetes. It had the exact same ketone smell of my cat’s breath when he got the disease.
I remember that the ketone smell is a clinical sign of diabetes. I’d have to look it up to find out why that’s so. My organic/biochemistry knowledge has been pretty stagnant since the early ’70s but i do remember most of the reactions of ethanol (and have personally experienced a lot of them…)
How amazing this all is. I wish I believed I could ever make my own vinegar, though even if I could I’m certain it would never be as good as yours. Wish I had a mother who could provide the mother too!
Dear It’s, Don’t be afraid, just give it a try. With a little fiddling, it’ll start producing. I assure you.
That brought tears to my eyes (and I’m a male).
Peter, I don’t usually like making men cry, but in this case I did. Glad it touched you. And Happy New Year to you.
Tod und Verklärung! Your story shows, as in ancient Sufi wisdom, how everything in life is always receding — marriages, vinegar mothers, hairlines — but there’s always hope. Lovely, Erica, just lovely. You never fail.
Woman of Steel,
Thank you for passing on this Sufi philosophy. Does everything diminish? Could that be true? If everything in life is always receding, do things come along to take their places, or are the just patched up, like with a bad hair piece?
Thanks for everything.
As a result of that lucky bit of serendpity, grace, call it what you will, Vinegar Mother lives on — as ugly as a bad hairpiece, perhaps, but certainly much better tasting. Salad salud!
This is a marvelous tale! What a good daughter you turned out to be, unlike myself. I willingly put to rest my kombucha mother after I discovered she was secretly, albeit lightly, intoxicating this teetotaller. I miss her creepy presence and did feel a twinge of remorse as I sent her off with a flush on a one way tour of the Paris sewers. Happy New Year to you, filled with love and abondance!
Hello Marieta,
Miss you. And you’re filled with love and abundance? Wow, you must have stopped riding the Paris subways.
I’m not sure I’m such a good daughter, but I’m trying. It’s a rough job these days.
Hey Erica! Just read the vinegar piece. Loved it. Thanks for the info. Though I have never made my own vinegar, as a private chef and lifelong cook, I totally get the emotional attachment to your creation. And I will now embark on my own vinegar mother-making, thanks to you!
Chris Lynch
Brooklyn, NY
http://www.LYNCHCOOKS.com
PS I will be cooking Red Mullet for first time tonight – S&P, light dredge in “00” & semolina & fry, lemons, green salad. Ciao!
Christopher,
It does become a child. Give it a try and let me know how it works out.
Dear Erica,
Great story! My mother (vinegar) is only a few months old and it looks healthy. I would like to share my work with a friend, how do I do that? Do I pour some of my vinegar in a bottle and give it to her with the hope it develops its own mother?
Thanks,
Claire
Claire,
You can cut a little piece off it and put it in a new jar, along with some of your vinegar. Usually when I’ve given people vinegar, it doesn’t develop a mother on it’s own. This was a special case.
Erica
I think you’ve misstated what happens. Vinegar DOES NOT need or use yeast. Vinegar is made when Acetobacter consumes ALCOHOL to produce Acetic Acid (vinegar). You need yeast to make alcohol and you need acetobacter to make vinegar from alcohol. My guess is that the bread merely served as food for wild yeasts to produce alcohol which were converted to alcohol
I came across your blog doing research on how to start my first red wine vinegar mother. Some other places on the web have mentioned adding one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to 16 oz of red wine and recording the bottle to start growing a mother. Any input? I see that you only added bread to wine rather than apple cider vinegar. I’m a total newbie at this so I thought I’d ask you what you thought.
Hi BlessedLIttleThistle,
I have heard about the cider vinegar, but I’ve never tried that. Does it have some special enzymes in it that would help activate a mother? I’ve just gone with the bread and it usually works. Although, at the moment, I’ve got another dead mother on my hands. The thing just crumbled and broke apart. I’m planning on starting over. I’m gonna research the cider vinegar thing and possibly try that.
Good luck with yours. And let me know how it goes.
**reCORKING** rather
Awesome story. I could feel your pain. I’m so glad you found a child😊😊. Happy vinegar making.
Thanks, David.
Ive recently developed an interest in starting my own red wine vinegar mother. I would love to hear more specifics regard how you started yours. In particular, how much wine to start, how much bread, what sort of container, etc.
Interesting retelling. Laughed when you said I visited my mother, not my vinegar’s mother’s housem
Thanks for sharing info about the trick of using some Italian bread to help make the vinegar. Perhaps a sourdough bread slice would work equally well?
Wonder what killed the mother. Now I’ll check my vinegars. Also, do you have anybody idea mixing distilled vinegar with a vinegar with a mother would kill the mother?