Day 14:

My equip­ment is clean, the sugar in the grape must is read­ing near 0 and I’m ready to press the wine!  The process is pretty sim­ple: scoop the must into the bas­ket press, let the free-run wine come out into a pail, and squeeze the left­over skins to get even more wine out of it.  But don’t squeeze too much or you’ll start crush­ing seeds and get­ting bit­ter wine.

Pressed Wine

The one thing my wine­mak­ing books didn’t say any­thing about was what to do with the free-run and pressed wine.  I wasn’t about to go over-the-top and do taste tests while blend­ing the two together–I wanted to use all the wine I got!  But It became obvi­ous if I wanted a con­sis­tent final prod­uct, I needed to blend all the wine together–a job that was far to big for the pail the wine was run­ning into.  So I impro­vised, wash­ing my pri­mary fer­menter on the fly and mix­ing all the wine in it before siphon­ing it off into my glass con­tain­ers.  It worked out fine. Con­tinue read­ing →

Day 5:

I checked in on my must, and was delighted to hear some faint bub­bling under the cap.  Suc­cess, the yeast are get­ting to work!  I punched down the cap, a rit­ual I will be doing 4–5 times per day until the fer­men­ta­tion is com­plete.  I want to make sure the yeast have enough air to do their job, and extract all that lovely color and fla­vor from the skins!  The must is at about 65°F, and will increase in tem­per­a­ture as the fer­men­ta­tion continues.

Punch­ing Down

Con­tinue read­ing →