Winemaking part 2

We have finished bottling the wine now.  It took 2.5 hours and we still have to clean up.  But out of that we have about 20 litres of wine, excluding the wastage to sediment and the inevitable sipsies.  The answer to the most important question is: it tastes really good!  It’s remarkably dry and clear, with some faint fruitiness and the slightest hint of sweetness.  It’s also really strong!  Some pictures:

The right tool for the job is a proper siphon designed just for that purpose – $16

This is how much we had left when we ran out of wine bottles…

So we resorted to:

and…

And our spaghetti jar, which held an admirable 3 litres or so.

Having tasted it and found it good, we’ll have to keep tasting to make sure we haven’t introduced too much oxygen during the bottling (which would turn it to vinegar) or incompletely sterilised the jars.  It would be a tragedy if it went off before we could drink it!

Now, a little lie down to recover from all those sipsies…

Winemaking

Friends of the family who own a vineyard recently had such a poor harvest they couldn’t even sell it, so kindly gave us around 30kg of Riesling grapes.  We spent a night (8ish till midnight) whizzing and squeezing the grapes, then pouring the juice, litre at a time, into a borrowed glass carboy.

30 kilos of Riesling grapes

The juicing and squeezing process

Filling up...

Filling up...

Full!

Some of the waste

Ten days later

The colour of the juice has lightened a lot over the last 10 days.  Presumably the juicing process allowed a lot of oxidation, and the subsequent anaerobic fermentation has re-reduced it.  Yay CO2, our fizzy friend.

The smell at the airlock is amazing – smells like the freshly popped cork of a nice, yeasty champagne.