A little dust on the bottle, revisited

A couple of days ago, my dad and I stopped by our friend's house, in whose garage the primary fermentation of the grapes is taking place. By that time, they had already been fermenting for about four days. The smell was pungent, but it brought back a lot of memories from when my dad made wine when I was little. It smells, well, it sorta smells like rotten grapes. But I happen to like it. The vat was warm to the touch. About 74 degrees Fahrenheit, according to our infra-red thermometer. The grapes themselves were a tad warmer. I guess the yeast feeding on the grapes is an exothermic reaction. That is, it releases heat energy. I took some photos. They're not great quality, as I took them with my phone, but you can sort of see what the crushed grapes look like about halfway through the primary fermentation process: Here's a shot of the grapes just sitting in the vat. The whole mixture is beginning to take on the dark purple color that most people would recognize as the color of wine. The juice itself is really weird looking. It's surprisingly opaque, and it's almost a lavender color. You can actually hear the juice in the vat bubbling as the fermentation takes place. The bar sticking out of the muck is a metal bar we use to aerate the mixture. We just sort of push it in and out, reaching all the way to the bottom, in order to make sure that the bottom most grapes in the vat are getting their fair share of oxygen. This has to be done several times a day. It's weird, when you break the surface of the grapes with the rod, and some of the juice bubbles up to the surface, it's bubbling so fiercely it almost looks like it's boiling.
Here's a shot of our friend aerating the mixture with the metal bar.

It's been a pretty interesting experience so far, and I'm quite looking forward to the next few steps of the process.

A little dust on the bottle...

I got to try my hand at winemaking today. My dad's been making his own wine since as far back as I can remember, and he now wants to pass his knowledge on to me. I have to say, he excels at it. His wine is better than probably 80 or 90% of the stuff on the market. Of course, I'm not a wine expert, but my brothers are, and they seem to like it as well.

But I digress. If I'm going to learn winemaking from anyone, it's going to be my dad.

Today was the harvest. We spent most of the day out in the field harvesting ripe bunches of grapes from the vines in our friend's backyard. We harvested just over a thousand pounds of grapes. We then brought those bunches over to the crusher. You see, the first step in winemaking (other than the harvest, of course) is to crush the grapes and let the big vats of juice, grape flesh, skin, and stems ferment for ten days. That's called primary fermentation. That's what we did today. Now we monitor the primary fermentation for ten days, allowing just the right amount of fermentation to take place, making adjustments as necessary.

In ten days, we press the grapes and filter out the skins and stems. That's when you end up with something that looks a little more like wine, but it won't be wine yet. Once we press them, it's time for the secondary fermentation.

More on this topic in ten days or so.

Until the next post,
BigD