Wine Night

We did a little work on our Zinfandel on Tuesday night. I would like to have shown more pictures, but my camera is several infested with Camera Cancer and is on its last legs. I'll talk more about that in a future post. Therefore, if you're reading this backwards, you already know what I haven't even written yet. While you are there in the future, perhaps you could send back some lottery numbers or a promising horse race. How 'bout my obit?

Okay...kind of losing focus! Ha! A camera joke!

Our task on Tuesday was to pull the pulp out of the must (the official wine makers term for fetus wine) and squeeze as much juice as possible out of it. We started with 100 pounds of grapes and because there was so much grapage, we had to start the ferment in two buckets.

I stirred it every other day or so to break up the cap the pulp would form on top. There was juice in there but it was difficult to tell how much because of the huge amount of pulp.

So we scooped out enough to fill a large mesh bag and then squeezed. We probably filled the bag five or six times. I had purchased a big 18 gallon bucket at the Home Depot and that was the receptacle into which we squeezed our juices.

When we finished, I poured what looked like a lot of juice back into my freshly cleaned six gallon fermenter. We filled the bucket to just over the 6 gallon mark, so we were happy. One hundred pounds of grapes yielded six gallons of juice. Yea and Hallelujah!

From the bucket, we syphoned the juice into a six gallon carboy. It is now sitting in the kitchen and slightly bubbling away. It still has a way to go before the fermenting process is complete.

The must tastes very grapey but you can taste the alcohol as well. I'll take a gravity reading in a week and proceed from there. I'll have to taste it too. Fortunately, there's six gallons.