GRAPE HARVESTING & WINE MAKING!!!
Wine vat and grape crusher set up on new floor
Pam and Mark came to help us harvest and process our grapes; we picked five buckets (of 55L each) of fruit (Brett estimated each bucket weighed 50 – 60lbs),
Half our grape harvest
Other half of our harvest
crushed them, with the machine we bought off Mr Luis which worked brilliantly and the wine vat was only about 1/3 full; so we decided to form a cooperative with Pam and Mark and go and pick their grapes too, we picked another four very full buckets.
Pam & Mark's harvest
The wine vat is now 2/3 full (over 200L); which is as full as it should be as the mixture will expand as it ferments. We don’t know how much volume will be lost once we rack of the wine but we’re hoping we could have around 180L (90L each, that’s 112 bottles). It’ll be a rose wine as we mixed all the grapes (and left the skins on*, how would you take the skins off?); the grape juice tasted lovely, it was quite sweet, but that will go as the sugar is turned into alcohol.
The crushed grapes & juice
We are going to start on the gym/studio floor tomorrow; we took all the tools down this afternoon. The floor has quite a slope from front to back and we spent a long time discussing how we were going to get the floor level. As we can’t make shuttering from wood; because (1) it’s very expensive and (2) it’s not terribly straight, we constructed a couple of concrete guides to work up to; it took a couple of hours as it was hard to get them level front to back and side to side, but it should make tomorrows task much easier.* All the wine making articles say red wine is made with the skins left on the grapes (not as you would expect from the black/red grapes) and white wine is made from grapes, without the skins left on (not white grapes). I do appreciate this, as I remember that green crab apples made a lovely pink wine; but I just can’t understand how the skins can be removed (plunge them into boiling water, then peel, like tomatoes?).
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