Making the wine

Lovely morning but heavy rain due all afternoon

I've been reading up about how to make wine at home. Unfortunately, none of the descriptions covers our situation so we have had to punt. We mashed the grapes by hand and with a sterilized wooden meat tenderizer. That worked reasonably well. For ten days, the grapes have fermented. Alex stirred daily and the bubbling going through the fermentation airlock was at times scary and loud but very satisfying. 

I bought yeast and Campden tablets. But how to extract the liquid from the vat after the first fermentation? Alex decided my muslin bag for making apple jelly was just the thing. Well in no book have I seen this, but it's worth a try. We found a nice demijohn at Ross House and cleaned it up. It looked like it hadn't been used in 30 years. Full of dead bugs and spiders. But it cleaned up beautifully and I sterilized it with the stuff that came with the winemaking kit. 

Alex found some predrilled stoppers from his old oyster growing days and they happened to fit the demijohn and the airlocks perfectly. Stage 2 would be completed without additional expenditure. And as the final steps of stabilising the wine won't be necessary -- we're going to have maybe 2 bottles if we're lucky -- we should be bottling on about a week. I'll report the specific gravity in the next post after we've measured it. 

BTW, YouTube has loads of useful how-to videos:  https://youtu.be/n7tauROWh0Y