Home Brews: My Own "How-To" Record

This summer, I moved into a house I that I thought was impossible to score in the city. Having stayed for the most part in the low lighting and low ceilings of basement suites with far too little leg room for me, my stuff and my dog, a double unit house with a garden was surreal. Without having to lift a finger, my yard provided me with a vast supply of figs, blackberries, apples, and just recently, beautiful fresh grapes right from the vine. Having such a bounty directly on your door step is inspiring, and for the last couple of months my partner and I have been making our best efforts to take full advantage of the delicious gifts lain in our laps.

A friend of ours suggested that we use the vast quantity of blackberries to make wine, and with that suggestion a spark of passion flowed through us both. We spent a few hours picking about 15lbs of berries, and followed an online recipe to create a simple brew. The instructions were super easy to follow and the potential pay-off was irresistible; check out the Blackberry wine recipe here to duplicate the experience. Daily, we doted over the potential we had bubbling in our storage room. The author of the recipe we used suggested that we create a journal to keep track of how and when we treated the wine, but our general excitement seemed to keep us pretty on-track. The simplicity of the project didn't really merit such a log, but now, after we've harvested 45lbs of fresh grapes and have begun to create our very own homemade grape wine, a record feels like a lovely necessity.

The complexity of this wine making project has increased five fold, and I'm hoping that I might get some like-minded followers on the blog who can make suggestions, or ante-up some personal experience on wine making. I feel like the final product is going to be a community builder, something I share with the people I care about with a great sense of pride, and maybe in the mean time, I can build a sweet sense of online community as well.

So with that, here goes my journal process!

Step One: Picking and cleaning the grapes available. Based on my personal summary of a great deal of online sources, our grapes were due to be picked just before or after the first frost fell over the atmosphere. The days had been getting shorter and colder for the last couple weeks, but last Wednesday, Vancouver garnered its first full frost. With some urgency, and a lucky break that the day that followed that morning's frost was fresh and rain-free, I spent three hours picking and clipping a grand total of 45lbs of grapes. I really under estimated the amount of time that picking, prepping, and cleaning would take with such a volume of fruit. Destemming the grapes and washing each prepped bowl took my partner and I four hours in total. We pretended to watch Indian Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, but we were truly mesmerized and consumed by looking over each individual grape and ensuring it passed quality control before being added to our home brew-to-be.

As total grape wine virgins, we hopped between several online sources to find our path through the next few parts of the plot. We used a combination of the following pages' information to carve out our path.

Your First Wine from Fresh Grapes
How to Make Wine from Grapes
The Winemaking Home Page
WineAdds

Step Two: Crushing the grapes and measuring acidity and sugar levels.

After sanitizing all the equipment we planned to use with potassium meta bisulphite and following up with a good rinse, we had to make some decisions about how to proceed with the fermentation process. Our biggest hurdle: deciding whether we wanted to create white or red wine. Turns out the major difference between red and white wine is how you choose to initially ferment the "must," or crushed grapes. Leaving the skin and seeds in the must when you begin fermentation increases the tannins in the wine you produce. As we were working with white grapes, we thought that following through with directions for a white wine would be our go-to plan. But as we continued to learn more about flavour development and the means of controlling acid and sugar levels, we decided to take a huge gamble and create our own hybrid method.

After crushing the grapes in seven pound batches we placed them into our initial fermentation vessels, two 5 gallon buckets, we left the must free-standing with skins, seeds and all. This method is generally suggested when beginning a red wine, where as for white wine, you would keep all of the grape material secured in a nylon bag, suspended above the grape juice. In all honesty, I had let my partner mix and mash all of our methodology, and it wasn't until I began to write this record that I realized something was amiss.