Wine Whine

We have too many grapes and not enough grape places. I'm going to need to start the fermentation of the grapes in two buckets.

Wait! I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's step back a couple of nights.

Tuesday night, Susan and I set about the task of removing the grapes from the stems and and crushing them for fermentation. I had planned on renting a crusher from Jim's Home Brew but he doesn't do that anymore. So we had to do it by hand. That ended up taking almost four hours. It was quite the drudgery and suddenly made us appreciate making wine from a kit.

One hundred pounds of mashed up grapes will not fit in my standard six gallon fermenter. So I am going to the Depot today and purchasing one of their five gallon orange Depot Buckets to divide the grapage into. It will require a small modification in order to add a vapor lock but that is no big deal.

Another item I have been ignoring is our batch of Blueberry wine that we started a couple of months back. It has been patiently sitting there doing it's aging thing. I think I need to do something to it, at least rack it to a fresh fermenter, but I haven't made the time to do it. This may be the reason our wine comes out so good. I don't pay close enough attention to it and it has to fend for itself.

In the meantime, we are in the midst of a high tension Susan Cleaning Frenzy as we approach Sunday's 5th Annual Pumpkin Carving Contest/Partay. Halloween is just over a week away and we are woefully prepared...except for candy. We are covered there! Of course, you can't have too many candy bars.