Making A White and a Red Blend | The Crush | Harvest 2020 | Vineyard Year 6

After an amazing harvest from my container vineyard, it's time to take these grapes home and make some wine.Let's crush some grapes!

Let's take a look with what we are working with here:

We've got 2 lbs of white grapes here, a combination of Palomino and Chardonnay.

And 1.5 lbs of red grapes, mostly Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, and some Grenache.

Let's start with the red grapes

For both grapes, we start by destemming the grapes from the clusters. In an actual winery, the process would be automated with a crusher destemmer machine. In my household, I have to do it by hand.

With the stems removed, now comes the fun part. The crush! With a blunt object, these grapes get crushed to release the juice.

Next, the juice gets moved into a mason jar. With these red grapes, I want to ferment the juice with the skins and seeds, so everything is going into the mason jar. To fit everything, I'm using two standard sized mason jars.

A short cleaning later and now it is time to crush the white grapes.

The same principle applies here, but when I am transferring the juice to the fermenter, the skins and seeds do not come along. So I have to press the grapes a bit here to extract all the juice possible. I must be careful not to crush any seeds as thatr would cause a lot of undesired flavors to enter the wine.

Alright now with both of these wines in the jars, let's add some yeast. Yeah I'm using bread yeast for this. I don't have wine yeast available to me at the moment and I'd rather this juice ferment now before whatever is in the juice takes over. 

To ferment in the mason jars, I modified the lids by sealing the top with a plastic bag with a few holes poked into them for ventilation. Should keep the bad air out while letting the CO2 produced escape.

So let's this ferment for about a week and check on it then.