Time for Wine

It has been three months since the last batch of wine, it was fine time to get another one started.  My boy joked with me the other day how my homemade presents from here on out are gonna be bottles of wine.  I have plenty of bottles sitting on a shelf in my utility room.  Fine by me, and probably fine by those that I give these ‘presents’ to.  Unless my wine isn’t really that good, and these presents that I am going to be giving out end up being the new fruit cake like gift that nobody really wants…  But I digress, back to making wine.  It was time to make a batch and last night I started one.  This batch is without a kit and I am going at it all on my own.  Nothing but google and my slowly emerging vintner skills.

About a month or so ago, I bought four gallons of frozen muscadine grapes from the Nashville wine store.  We only have 100 plus muscadine plants growing on the property and in a few years we will need to know what to do with all of them, might as well get started with the recipe testing, right?  I trekked across the road to my neighbor’s front door, pen and paper in hand, and asked him for his bestest muscadine wine recipe.  He had given me this recipe before, and even once again this last week, but when I knocked on his front door last month, I was ready to document his every word.  Although, that bit of paper got filed away for another day, because last night when I started on my batch of wine, I went with Mr. Google instead.  The reason for this, what if the wine doesn’t come out right?  It would be a shame to waste all of those grapes, bottles, etc. on 5 gallons of undrinkable waste.  So, I am gonna take this one gallon at a time for the time being (something my dad kindly suggested as well.)

I found a few recipes on several cooking sites, but none of them had the ingredients that I did.  I have some stuff that not the average person has like campden tablets, pectic enzyme, potassium metabisulphite; you know, the real wine making stuff.  I wanted a real wine recipe.

I think I found one.  It was easy, I had what I needed, and it yielded a gallon at a time.  Perfect!

I also happen to have a pretty heavy duty wine crusher, thanks to my dad, but I thought it to be a bit overkill for a mere gallon bag of grapes so I opted for a potato masher.  I think the next time I will go with the heavy duty device and just spend the extra time on clean up.  The potato masher was definitely not for the soon to be professional.

I followed all the directions I had scribbled down from the site, and only time will tell if this is the recipe to keep.  I am anxious for the next five days and I can’t wait to see if I have what it takes to make muscadine wine that would be good enough for these mid-southerners…