How to make wine from a couple of vines in your garden

 

People have been asking if they should try to make wine from vines in their garden. Most often these vines have come with the house and grow up pergolas or on terraces. Their origin is probably lost in time. Even if bought from a garden centre people don't remember what the variety is.

If the grapes taste sweet the thought arises 'why not make wine,' That's where things usually come to an end but they needn't do because making wine with household equipment couldn't be easier.

Everything must be kept clean. Note rubber gloves

First pick your grapes. If there are both white and red, no worries. You can make a 'Blouge' unless you have enough to make two vinifications, one for red and one for white. However, quantity is important as we shall see.

De-stem the grapes. This is not essential but preferable. Doing this also gives you the opportunity for quality control. 

Throw away any dubious ones. De-stemming can be done by hand. It takes a while but is quite therapeutic.

Boots for treading.

Next, crush the grapes either by treading them in a sanitized bucket (use Milton sterilizer for example - widely available for sterilizing babies' bottles). You can use your bare feet. We wear these boots bought in Venice for the Acqua Alta by common request. Otherwise you can put the grapes in a clean baking tray and bash with a potato masher.

Once the grapes start to look more like porridge than berries, you will need to press the grapes in order to obtain the juice. 

Potato basher (left) and Ricer

You could do this by putting them through a ricer or one of those hand cranked food mills.

  

That's all folks.

The 'cake'

Once you have the juice (and this might be less than you imagined), wash, clean out and sterilize one large and one small empty water bottle and pour the juice into them. This is where quantity comes in because you will need a bit more juice to top up the main bottle when it comes to racking as we shall see.

The next bit might involve you in buying a couple of airlocks and bungs. This is easy to do online and costs flumpence. Keep the grapejuice airtight with the bottle tops screwed tightly in while waiting for your order to arrive or make an airlock yourself. Check instructions on You Tube, There are a number of very boring videos telling you how to do this.

After a couple of days the juice might start bubbling producing satisfying burps in your airlock. This is the time to rack the juice off what is called the Gross Lees which will have collected in the bottom of the bottle. Just pour the juice into another bottle or container having sterilized these previously and pour the gunk down the sink, You can return the clean juice to the bottle and top up with juice from the auxiliary (smaller) bottle. Be sure to leave some headroom because the juice will well up during fermentation.

You may rack the juice once or twice again at some later point but basically just leave the juice to turn into wine which it will do miraculously in a couple of months.

The resulting wine may be delicious or not  but it will be yours.