If you have red wine available, you can use it to make your own red wine vinegar. It takes time, but it's not difficult. The method I used is like this one from: http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/283306 "First you need a vinegar "Mother" this is the bacterial culture that turns alcohol into vinegar. An easy cheap way to get one is to buy some "live" unfiltered cider vinegar from a health food store. I think one name is Bragg's cider vinegar. If you can get a "Mother" from someone who has a good one it will be better than starting with a raw vinegar. You can also buy a "Mother" from some wine and homebrew supply stores. Pour this into a large, 1 gallon or larger, wide mouth jar. Then pour in up to the same amount of wine/alcoholic beverage, never add more wine than you have starter or the vinegar will take forever to process. If possible shake the wine to get a lot of air mixed in before adding. This will help give the bacteria an oxygen boost. Cover the jar top with a piece of thin cloth such as a bandana, held on with a large rubber band. This will keep out fruit flies, also called vinegar flies, but allow air in. Then stick the jar in a dark place that is around 60-70 degrees and leave it alone for awhile. A month or so. After this you can gently add more wine every week or so. You don't want to jostle the vinegar because if you do the "Mother" that is growing on top will sink and drown. This slows down the process and can over time cause off tastes from the drowned and dead "Mother". The mother can get very thick, 1, 2, even 3 inches. When my jar starts to get full and also full of mother I take out the mother and squeeze the vinegar out of it over a very large bowl. This is a nasty slimy weird job but the mother is 99% vinegar and the best part to use for starting more vinegar. Some people describe "Mother" from red wine as looking like placenta / afterbirth. A somewhat accurate description. Every now and then you can pour out a quart or so of vinegar. Filter through first a bandana then if you want a coffee filter. At this point you can either: Put in a sealed jar and let it sit for at least a month or six, to take off the raw edge. Then filter again and you can use it. This will be a lightly filtered live vinegar. Or you can put in a mason / ball jar and process at 165 degrees for ten minutes. Then let it sit and age for a month or six to mellow it out. Then filter and use. This will give you a vinegar that is dead and will not age as fast but will be more like commercial vinegar. You can use any low alcohol beverage such as wine- red, white, desert wines, saki, beer- any decent type but it will only be as good as what you start with, hard cider, fruit wine, champagne, sherry, port, etc. Commercial vinegar is watered down to about 5% acid, the vinegar you make will have apx. the same acid content as the alcohol content was in your starting liquid. A wine of 11% alcohol will make a vinegar of 11% acidity. You can dilute the vinegar but I use it straight and take allowances in my recipe or use." I bought mine from a winemaking supply store, but gave lots of my mother away once I got it going. I gave it up when I had my kids (like so many other hobbies, LOL), but now that they're bigger I might start some again. Leigh

Since it's you I'll answer in this forum because I know you want experience and not just "approved" answers. Are you the one that insisted on fermenting the apples with natural yeasts? If so, you're "lucky", you only have the stuff that makes alcohol in your cider. If I was assured of only the natural yeasts and not the bacteria I'd use the natural yeasts too. If you pasteurized or used camden tablets and threw bought yeast that is why you were lucky, you killed the bacteria. You now need to throw the bacteria that turns the alcohol into vinegar. You should be able to find it by searching homebrew stores for "mother of vinegar". Alternately you can throw some unfiltered unpasteurized natural vinegar from a healthfood store and grow your own culture to inoculate all your bottles with. If you are the one that tempted fate and used the natural yeasts you probably want to tempt it again and use the natural bacteria. In that case expose them to air and hope for the best, but it didn't work the first time so I wouldn't hold your breath. Know you would be taking a crap shoot with the correct bacteria entering and being the one to grow the fastest (a dog in the yard and feeding ecoli to little kids is why I pasteurize my cider). By expose it to air I mean really expose it to the air, put it back in the vat you pressed into and whisk it. This will drive off the CO2 and since you said it was carbonated it may be helpful no matter what method you use, if I'm remembering right the carbonation serves a purpose other than tickling the nose. If I didn't want to expose it to random acts of bacteria I'd siphon it from bottle to bottle letting it slosh before throwing the mother of vinegar. You can test and adjust your own acidity pretty cheaply (again from the homebrew stores). If they don't go by the simple "acid test kit" it would be a "titration kit". You're really lucky you didn't have blow ups if you had those sealed the whole time. The amount of potential alcohol it takes to blow a beer or wine bottle designed to take pressure is not that much and if you plugged fresh cider bottles that tends to finish around 5%, that's a lot of gas. The bubbler tops are not that expensive, you can even use balloons and burp them (and if you want to know some other ways just ask me in the other forum where I'm sure to see it). I wouldn't doubt if now that you've taken the pressure off some of them start fermenting again. BTW, my apple wine came out pretty good. I don't normally drink either but 1 gallon is not going to be anywhere near enough. It has to be 12%-15% and I can't taste the alcohol (I can normally taste any alcohol). For the cheap yeast I used the yeast flavor isn't so bad either. I'm hardening at least 5 gallons this year, probably 10 gallons if I get enough apples.

My vinegar began itself last summer on my counter. I had put some blueberries into commercial vinegar to flavor the vinegar. Life got in the way, I didn't get to the jar to fish the berries out and boil the richly colored, fragrant vinegar within a few days as the recipe directed, so I feared that I might be incubating a bacterial stew. Scientist at heart, I decided to wait and watch, rather than either risk my family's health, or simply toss it. I did remove the berries. Over the next weeks, a slimy mass grew. A little internet research confirmed that a mother had grown, and capped her mixture. That vinegar, delicious, complex, was siphoned off and is relished! Now I save a little red wine from each bottle to toss into that old jar with the original mother. This batch is converting more slowly, but vinegar is forming! The original berries did have fresh yeasts on their skins, so I wonder if that is where the inoculation for the mother came from? Give it a try.

The Herb Guild I am a part of makes herb and fruit vinegars to sell at the Botanic Gardens here. For fruit vinegars, we simply wash and dry well (my understanding is that any extra water will dilute the vinegar and lower the acidity that keeps bacteria from forming). We then place in a gallon jar with whatever herbs we like and cover with vinegar (white wine in our case, but cider should pair well for this application). In my experience, I see no reason why the pulp/skins wouldn't work, though you may end up with more of a tannin flavor from the grape skins, rather than the sweetness, since you've already pulled a lot of the sugars out with your juice. Personally, I would do the smaller batches, so that if one doesn't work, you can just dump it without losing all of it, and fill the jars about 1/3 full of pulp to start, or try a few different amounts. Also, it would be a shame to waste the vinegar if you find you don't use the end product. If you like it, expand production next year? I don't know for sure, but I would be concerned with the vinegar eating the seals on the spigot on your larger dispenser jar. I would taste your vinegar every few days to decide when it gets to the point you want it. I've had herb vinegars get bitter steeping in two weeks, while others steep longer with no problem. You could also consider some spices such as some anise stars or cinnamon sticks. Fennel seed may pair very well too. Ground spices generally tend to cloud vinegars and don't work that well. I would wait until you strain the pulp from the vinegar to deal with sugar, heating the vinegar to below boiling and stirring briskly to dissolve. Add just enough to sweeten to your taste and uses. Personally, I store my vins filtered, with no remaining herbs or fruit. You may have already discovered this fact sheet in googling and old searches, but it's still good info. Here is a link that might be useful: Fact sheet on making flavored Vinegars