Home Experiment
Posted: 24th October 2009
In our garden we have a very old wooden greenhouse. Its so old that one of the things that is currently supporting it (and ironically may be the cause of its inevitable demise) is a solitary grape vine. All the time we've been at this house it has anually produced tasty grapes although not much more than a few mouthfuls. Either way we have never given it any attention save a bit of pruning every so often.
However this year it produced a stupendous amount of grapes - they were just everywhere. As we admired its strange exuberence the thought popped up of trying to use its crop to make wine. My father had previously attempted this in the 70s with grape juice and reported that it tasted of chemicals. Suspecting that he had ignored some vital step at some point I decided to take on the challenge. 4 hours later I had picked over 5kg of grapes... and then I realised I had no idea or equipment for this kind of activity.
Whilst I researched on the internet they sat in a shed and were left alone until after a visit to a local brewing shop. After 4 hours of washing the grapes and removing them from their stems I crushed them, settled them and then started their fermentation process in our boiler room (much to my mother's annoyance). I subsequently kept a daily check on it, adding sugar syrup to up the end alcohol content.
Today they had reached a point where not much more fermentation will happen so I've removed all the must to be left with.....just under 10 litres of the early stages of wine! This has amazingly upped my prediciton of a few bottles to an entire crate! Its also starting to resemble the right colour of wine as well (last night it was bright pink, today its turned a sort of magenta). Tomorrow I will be putting it into its first demijohn and 10 days later into another.
As far as the future of it is concerned it won't be ready till November 2010 but I'm too thrilled and excited to care about that - if I can get just one bottle to produce something half decent I'll be over the moon. Unfortunately I can't sell the stuff (by law) but I'm sure I'll be able to think of a few events in which I could use it (Dad's birthday, Christmas, etc.)
In other news, university is still great (save for a few late night classes), the work is challenging but doable. I've been climbing a bit, taken part in a race (badly) but I've yet to go to a skiing session which I intend to remedy on Tuesday. I've also signed up for the skiing holiday.