Surely, there are some on this forum that make wine at home, so speakup if you see I'm doing something wrong/bad/not-so-good for my wine, since it will be a long, long time (years?) before I know if it's any good.
I was asked the other day if I wanted some grapes. Yep, sure, that sounds good. I and a friend show up and there are 2-5gal buckets of them already picked and ready to go (today I found out there are lots more and I can have them if I want). I'm not sure what type of grape, they are almost black (really dark rose, Concord?), and in bunches.
I sorted through them, destemmed and washed them thoroughly. I ended up with about 2.5 gals of hand crushed must. I added about 3/16 tsp of Potassium Metabisulfite and then started testing the acid and specific gravity. Ph was below the 4 on my tester so I started adding water (~2.5 gal total) until around 4.5 to 5 ph on the meter. Then started adding sugar (raw and unprocessed) by dissolving into boiling water (cooled and added to must) until the specific gravity was about 1.090.
I started out using distilled water (about 1.5gal) until I read that that's a no-no (no nutrients for the yeast), so I switched to well water boiled and then cooled. Ended up with about 5 gal of must (in a 7 gal bucket).
That was yesterday.
Today I made a yeast starter (Red Star Montrachet) by boiling some water (1 cup in a clean pint jar), cooled off to body temp, added yeast and a 1/4 tsp of sugar...30 mins later a huge head of foam (dang, don't tighten the lid!). Started adding in some must from the bucket 1/8 cup at a time in 1 hour increments. after about 3 hours poured the yeast starter into the must (bucket) since it was spewing foam all over the jar.
Waiting...waiting...waiting...think I'll have some merlot (after 5:00pm et, of course) while waiting...
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