Winemaking

Rhys has been having a go at making some wine! We inherited a row of grape vines with the house - about a dozen vines of two or three different varieties, but we don't know what they are. The previous owner said they were eating / table grapes but there are far too many to eat. We picked them this week and there were 69kg of grapes.

As you can probably see they're not all ripe but some were over-ripe and wasps etc. were starting to get at them, so we thought they'd better come off. Also quite a few are rather small so we probably need to prune the bunches while they're growing next year, to get bigger grapes. About two thirds of them are black, the rest white.

We bought some kit to make them into wine (we hope!) and David and Lynne helped us to strip the grapes from their stalks. After mashing the fruit up we put the lot into kegs with their skins so we aim to get red wine but its a lot of trouble keeping the skins below the liquid. Anyway we've now removed the skins and the must is fermenting nicely with the addition of some wine yeast (as well as the natural yeast) and sugar.

Rhys now needs to be patient and leave them to do their thing for a while! The must is now all in one big keg with an airlock, but probably a bit too much headroom at the top.

We'd better get collecting some bottles to decant it into when it's finished - fortunately that's not too hard here with lots of good wine on the table from Bordeaux, the Medoc and Blaye nearby. Good excuse for a bottle or two more as we need the bottles. We'll let you know how ours turns out (unless it all turns into vinegar!)