Pressing grapes on a small scale is so much fun! If you have been following along, we harvested grapes, cold soaked them for 6 days, then fermented them for 9 days and now after all the sugar has been converted to alcohol, and the must (grapes) have gone silent we press off the skins and seeds and only get juice. In the picture below you will see that we first siphon off the liquid on the bottom into your container. Then you take a bucket and get the wet grapes into the bladder press. All of the wine that is now in your container is called the “free run”. It is the most tart, lightest color and has the lowest pH. Many winemakers keep this separate when they perform malolactic fermentation, racking and aging of the wine. It is then blended into the other wine for balance or in many cases kept apart. All part of the winemaking art! Now you turn on the press and start to get juice from the grapes. This will take about 1-2 hours, depending on the strength of your press. In our case we had 80 gallons of free run and 27 gallons of pressed wine. Lastly, if you are there when the press is nearing the end, the wine is very dark and rich.

The grapes fermented for a week and on Saturday Oct 17th the hydrometer reading got to zero! We were ready to press and put the “wine” into a large 7 gallon carboy. Joey, Cody and I spent about 3 hours pressing, filtering, cleaning to get our first vintage ready. It will now sit in the carboy for about a month until it goes still, or stops the last bit of fermentation. During this period of time the sediment (lees) will fall to the bottom. We will then transfer this to a smaller containers 3 more times and take out the sediment so that we have clear wine. Of course, we will have to taste it to make sure it is OK and make sure it is good to bottle in about 6 months. In the next post I will detail the readings we took in case anyone is interested.

Below are some pictures we took along the way.