Bumper grape crop now making wine

[smdjoachim]

This year i will be having a bumper grape harvest(around 40 bunches).

I would like to turn this into wine but i don't know where to begin.

Don't ask me what type of grapes they are,all i can say is they are green and a slightly sharp when ripe.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[floydmeddler]

Suppose a good starting point would be to collect enough juice to take a hydrometer reading. Hopefully it will be up around the 1010 mark as you don't want to be adding sugar. Then you could ferment out a few litres using different yeasts. Watched an episode of River Cottage a while back where a fella allowed the natural yeasts in the grape skins do the fermenting. Thought that was brilliant.

[floydmeddler]

Quick search found this:
http://www.winemakermag.com/new/fresh

[smdjoachim]

Thanks , a good read.

[danbrew]

Or go here...

www.winesathome.co.uk

These guys import grapes once a year and pile round to the organisers house to make a sh!t load of wine. The forum should have plenty of advice for you... Something you should probably consider is getting something to test the acidity of the must to check what/if you need to adjust. It's all on this site though I'm sure...

[boingy]

I would advise against trusting to natural yeasts on the grape skins.
I tried a similar thing with cider many years ago - the book said just leave it and it will ferment naturally. We ended up with two demijohns of rancid apple juice. It was particularly annoying because we had spent hours making the juice with no equipment except a normal kitchen blender!

So, use some yeast!

[smdjoachim]

And i thought making beer was tough!

[floydmeddler]

Keep us posted! Pics would be brilliant too.

[danbrew]

And i thought making beer was tough!

It's a bit like beer making in that it's as hard as you make it and it depends on your expectations of the finished product. You could keep it as simple as this...

Press/ crush the juice out of the grapes - but be careful of breaking the pips. (My grandad used to crush them with his hands initially to get the bulk of the juice out, then wring the remaining pulp in a boiled/ cooled tea towel)
Taste the juice to check that it's fairly sweet and not massively bitter/ acidic
Take an OG reading then add sugar to get it up to 1.080 or above
Add campden tablets (according to instructions) and leave for 24 hours
After 24 hours add the wine yeast

Leave to ferment out. After the first vigorous ferment (say a week or two?) transfer to a secondary fermenter (leaving as much crap behind as possible) to ferment out - could be a couple of months!

When it's done, use wine stabilizer to bring it to a complete halt. Taste. If it tastes really acidic then your best option is to make a sweet wine which you can do by adding unfermented grape juice to the stabilized wine until you are happy with the taste. I'm sure there are numerous who can correct me, but I think 1.005 is about medium sweet. If it's not too acidic then you can stick with dry if you prefer.

Bottle it. If this is a white wine and you have sweetened it then it won't be long before it's ready...

Photo's, Photo's, Photo's...!

[smdjoachim]

Photo as requested



They should be ripe towards end of August

[likesbeer]

what a lovely bunch of grapes ;o)

For what its worth this is what I would do........
(I make cider, succesfully, and all I do to that is add yeast, this year I'm going to try a little without adding anything. Previous attempts of following book instructions and adding campden tablets was no where near as nice as adding nothing)
The other half of my family (the boss) is Bulgarian and making wine is the national pass time (or that is how it looks to me) the in-laws even have a small vine yard (500m2 of vines about 200 litres a year)
Grapes get crushed into a large FV leaving stalks et al. and allowed to ferment for ~10 days (ish) after that the juice is racked off the skins etc and left for a further 40 days (ish). The only addition is some sugar either to make it very strong or compensate if the juice doesnt have enough to start with. No additions of yeast or campden tablets to kill off natural yeasts.
If after maturing for a while it is either to dry or acidic serve with a little lemonade.
This to me is the absolute simplest method, if I had this amount of grapes I'd use a 30 litre FV bucket mash the grapes with a potatoe masher cross my fingers and hope that the natural yeast did the job properly.
There are lots of ways but I would start with the simplest see how it comes out and next eyar you can adjust to fix if something goes wrong.
I would also think that after the first 2 or 3 days if nothing had started to ferment then perhaps add some yeast.
Good luck and keep us posted

[smdjoachim]

I intend to be as authentic as possible when it comes to crushing.
Shoes and socks off then!!!!!!

But i will add yeast rather than risk it going au natural

[danbrew]

Ooh! I can't stop drooling over that photo. Good luck with it... Absolutely no way I'd be trusting that bumper crop to wild yeasts...

[Cidermaker]

I'd leave those grapes on the vine as long as you can bear to, certainly after then end of August. I have some greenhouse vines, which I harvested last September, and I feel that I could've left them for longer. Outdoor grapes won't really be ripe in this country until October.

[smdjoachim]

Today we make wine.

After a bit of research we decided the KISS (keep it simple stupid) method would be best.
2 buckets were filled with the grapes



Rinsed in water ,then crushed the authentic way.




Gravity was 1082




Yeast added





Will let it ferment for a week before I strain the juice into a couple of demijohns.