Weekend of Pressing and First Racking

Over the weekend I pressed the Must, let the juices "rest" for a bit and then racked into the Carboy's for the next phase.

2 Gallons of Must, from 6 1/2 vines, generated 1 1/2 gallons of wine. Not bad for the first year.. Hopefully as the Vines mature they will produce more grapes.. Or I'll just have to plant more vines ;-)

Here are some links to the videos:

Ready to Press:

1 1/2 gallons for the first year:

Early Harvest

Well, this is a learning year and we shall see if my mistake is a learning moment, or if the wine turns out OK.

Sunday 9/4 I checked the Brix and it was at 22.. being slightly.. OK REALLY impatient I forgot to recheck all my Notes and thought TIME TO HARVEST!!!!

Only after I had already Harvested 3 of the 4 Vines did I remember one note, which was that the stems should be brown before harvesting.. Mine were still mainly green.

Here are the grapes before harvest:

And the after Crushing "mess":

9/5... after letting the must "rest" for a day after adding Campden tablets, I added the yeast. This morning before leaving for work I checked and we have the beginning Fermentation!!

Pre-harvest Video:

Preparing to Crush:

After the Crush: 

Verasion Time and looking good!

The Marquette's and Frontenac have started their Verasion. Really great to see the "Fruits" of my labor coming to Verasion  ;-)

July of 2011

The grapes are growing! Here is a video that I made on July 5th:

Need to get out and adjust the clusters so there is only one cluster per shoot, but things are looking good to have be making wine this fall!

Spring 2011

Spring of 2011 brings hope. By May 11th there were many bud's breaking through:

This will be my 3rd growing season, and a few of the vines were 1-2 years old at the time of planting so I plan to let some of the vines produce grapes this year.

It is now June and some of the vines are looking very good:

Now it's time to watch, prune and hope...