A friend of ours gave us buckets full of red grapes. We had wanted to make wine from our own grapes, but we didn’t have a large enough harvest this year. We had already done some reading on the subject and purchased most of the equipment needed. We had never talked to him about winemaking, so it was quite a surprise when he drove over and offered us some grapes. His gift of grapes gave us the nudge we needed to finally try our hand at making red wine from grapes. We are still waiting for the final fermentation to finish, but it is going well so far.
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| I am sorting through about 20 gallons of raw grapes and picking only the good grapes to go into the wine (the bucket on the left). We ended up with about 10 gallons of good grapes ready for crushing. |
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| No need to stomp my feet in the grapes for such a small batch when a potato masher will handle it. We ended up with about 7 gallons of crushed grapes split between two 5 gallon buckets. |
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| The yeast is added after the crushed grapes are in covered buckets for 24 hours. Also, about 6 cups of sugar was added to the crushed grapes. With the yeast added, the must (grape juice) will ferment for up to 10 days with the grape skins and pulp for red wine. |
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| After 8 days of primary fermentation this is the result. It was kind of stinky on top, but once all the skins were skimmed off the juice was very good. |
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| For the secondary fermentation the juice is separated from the pulp and skins into a sanitized 5 gallon bucket using cheese cloth as a strainer. |
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| With the juice in our clean 5 gallon bucket we siphoned it into a 5 gallon glass carboy for the secondary fermentation. We added about 25 ounces of sugar dissolved in water as well as a couple quarts of store bought grape juice to bring the wine up to the top of the carboy. |
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| The secondary fermentation in a 5 gallon carboy is capped with an airlock to prevent any outside bacteria and unwanted yeast from contaminating the wine. The secondary fermentation will take 3 to 4 weeks. We’ll see how it turns out in a few weeks…so far, so good! |
