More wine making stuff
I’ve been home sick with a bad ear infection since Thursday morning. I finally took a nap that afternoon, only to wake to the smell of muscadine grapes.
I thought I was dreaming. I had asked Ron to pick grapes for me to make into wine, but I didn’t actually think he’d do it.
Well, shoot. He’d picked me over 20 lbs of grapes and I really only needed 18 lbs for a 3 gallon batch of wine. But since he picked them and I didn’t want to mess around with freezing and thawing, I got out the food mill and set it up.
My food mill can’t handle raw grapes. Well, it can, but it’s torture and I swear we are going to break the dang thing. Even with a grape spiral for it, it’s either shooting out squashed grapes or skins so dry that Ron thinks the thing needs a motor for it. Ron did most of the cranking, I just fed in grapes. I finally had to tell him to back it up every once in a while. Juice would be flowing back into the hopper, but no grape skins or seeds would be coming out of the waste end. Nor any juice out of the screen, it would just get too packed up with the skins and seeds.
We processed about 16 lbs of grapes before I said that was enough, no more raw grapes. I’ll freeze them and thaw them, and that should work better.
Anyhow, since I had well over a gallon of juice, close to 1.5 gallons.. heck, that’s enough for a batch of wine. I tested the acid in the juice with a test strip, and it was in the right range. I added sugar and water and yeast nutrient and pectic enzyme. Tested the specific gravity and it was right around 1.090, a bit over. Good!
Pitched the yeast today and by morning it should be bubbling like crazy and making lots of alcohol, lol!
It does still smell of muscadine grapes… but I think I’m getting used to that smell. Last year I hated it, smelled like diesel fuel. This year, well, I keep tasting the grapes and they taste nice if you don’t smell them so much. I think the grapes will make a very nice wine.
I hated the tomato wine when I tasted it last weekend… it was horrible even after sweetening it back a bit. It just tastes like rotten tomatoes to me. But Ron likes it. So, we bottled it and he wants to drink the big bottle of it sometime soon. I told him to go ahead and drink it, just don’t expect me to drink any of it. LOL! I managed to have JUST enough bottles for that, so that was good. I wasn’t forced to drink any extra like with the blackberry wine. I was happy to drink the extra blackberry wine even if it is still sort of raw and new.
Ron doesn’t usually read my blog, but he’s been reading over my shoulder tonight and laughing.
time for chatting…
hugs,
Vyx
On the advice of my homebrew store (http://homebrewusa.com) when I made my ground cherry wine a few years ago I let it age over a year before cracking open the first bottle. What had tasted so bad that I labeled it ‘Meh!’ when I bottled it turned out to be one of my favorite country wines.
(oddly enough the ad right now in the sidebar of this blog has a girl wearing a shirt that says “meh” — and I’d read this post via email and clicked over to comment. Eerie!)