Growing Grapes and Making Wine
(Page 3 of 7)
April/May 2003
By Jef Cox
BRINGING IN THE HARVEST
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While tasting the grapes is a fine way to know when to harvest them, also invest in a hydrometer—which measures the specific gravity of liquids—available at winemaking supply shops. This will tell you the sugar content of the berries. A specific gravity between 1.095 and 1.105 is ideal, especially a reading toward 1.105. Sample the grapes so you can learn how grapes taste at their optimum harvest-state. Also examine the seeds. If they are green, let the grapes hang, but don't let them hang any longer if the specific gravity reaches 1.105 or your wine will be overly alcoholic and unbalanced. What you're looking for is seeds that have mostly turned dark, or brownish. When the grape seeds are dark and the sugar level is right, go ahead and harvest.
WINEMAKING
If you're a winemaking neophyte, start by making a small batch of wine. Fifty pounds of good grapes will yield about 5 gallons of great wine. Winemaking supply shops may be able to procure food-grade plastic vats large enough to Accommodate the grapes, or use several large vitreous crocks.
Dump the ripe grape clusters into the vat or crocks, and crush them. No technology has yet surpassed the human foot for the proper gentle, but thorough, crushing of wine grapes, but the more squeamish may prefer using their hands or a potato masher. When the grapes are crushed, the crocks should be no more than two-thirds full.
To stun wild and unwanted yeast and prevent premature fermentation, you can add the appropriate number of Campden tablets (pre-measured amounts of potassi um metabisulfite) to the crushed grapes—usually one tablet per gallon of wine. Cover the crock with a towel and let it sit for a day.
The following day, add a packet of wine yeast (not bread yeast) to the must, as the crushed gapes are called. Montrachet is the most commonly used type of yeast for red wine; prix de mousse also is used. After stirring in the yeast, use your hands to comb through the must and remove the cluster stems. Squeeze off any berries that may still be clinging to the stems. Leave no more than a few stems in the must, as too many can add too much raw tannin and leave the wine tasting "stemmy." Cover the crock with a towel (to prevent bacteria-carrying fruit flies from invading) and set the crock aside. In a day or two it will start fizzing. By three days, it will look like it's boiling.
After about a week, the fizzing will have almost subsided. Separate the new wine from the skins, pulp and seeds. If you have a wine press, use it. Otherwise dump the contents of the crocks or vat into food-grade plastic mesh bags or cheesecloth and squeeze out as much wine as you can into a clean basin. Then pour the wine through a strainer and funnel that's set into the mouth of a 5-gallon glass carboy (the kind used for dispensing drinking water; they're also available at winemaking shops) or into the bunghole of a clean, empty wine barrel.
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