Join us for our first of a two part series of making wine from our Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from our backyard vines. We have six Cabernet Sauvignon, and three Gewurztraminer grape vines. This year we harvested the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes on September 29th, and finished the process to let them sit for three months starting October 14th. In this part one, you will see us harvest, destem and crush the grapes. I forgot to record some steps in the process, but in future episodes I will be more on the ball.
Time Stamps
- 0:00 Intro
- 0:55 1. Harvesting the Grapes
- 2:10 2. Separate and Crush the Grapes
- 4:15 3. Pitch Yeast
- 5:56 4. Press Grapes
- 6:27 Outro
Transcript
Cold Open
I had picked and crushed the Gewurztraminer grapes the week before.
Intro
Welcome to another Campbell’s Garden episode. During the growing season we post weekly garden updates and recipes all year round. Today we are harvesting our Cabernet Sauvignon grapes for winemaking! We’d like to invite you to subscribe to the channel and ring the bell to get notified about future Campbell’s Garden videos.
Discussion
This is the third time we have ever made wine from our grapes. After planting, Grape vines traditionally take four years before they produce grapes that are numerous enough in quantity and sugars to harvest. We have six grape vines, split between two trellis’, about six feet apart. With one vine continually struggling. You should be able to expect on a regular growing season to harvest one gallon of juice from each vine from their grape clusters. This year we were fortunate enough to have six gallons, even with one of the vines not producing at all, and two under producing.
1: Harvesting the Grapes
Making wine from your own grapes can be a challenging process if you have never done it before, so I relied heavily on The Home Winemaking Channel’s tutorial series and suggestions to make this and previous batches. I will have links to their YouTube channel in the description of this video. Initially all you are going to need are containers to hold the grapes, and pruning shears to remove the grape clusters from the vines. Try your best to only get the grape clusters as you will have to manually separate the leaves and sticks later on. Again, we were able to remove two six gallon buckets worth of grape clusters from our six vines. You should measure the sugar in the grapes to determine when they are ready to be harvested. We started on September 29th this year.
Once you have the grape clusters, we like to submerge them all in water to force any insects off of them. This can take up to ten minutes or more, though we still had a few critters desperately clinging to them for survival. We would toss them in the lawn and our chickens would take it from there.
2: Separate and Crush the Grapes
Separating the grapes can be a tedious process if you are a small batch winemaker like us. Traditionally you would have a destemmer or a machine that would do the hard work for you, but since it’s only twelve gallons of grapes, we used a crate turned upside down, and rubbed the clusters over it, and threw away the stems and leaves. These would later be added to our compost pile for next season’s garden. I ended up having a wonderful time with my wife. We just chatted and joked till the job was complete. You really don’t have to worry about bacteria or contamination with these grapes at this stage. We added Pectic Enzyme and Potassium Metabisulphite to help break down the grapes and protect them through this process.
We were pleasantly surprised to see a bold jumping spider eat another spider while we were destemming and my wife had to stop to take a photo of it. We continued to manually crush the grapes for a while to make sure there was enough initial juice to take readings from. We ended up having to add sugar to bump our Brix up to 24.
3: Pitch Yeast
Once we had the grape skins and wine all ready, we divided it up between two six gallon buckets and pitched our yeast. We used the Lalvin EC-1118 wine yeast. Again, don’t be overly worried about bacterial control. The contact with the grape skins is integral at this point to color the wine, at this phase and you will be opening up the containers and punching down the grape skin cap three times a day throughout fermentation. Our fermentation with this batch lasted a full week.
4: Press Grapes
After fermentation was complete, we grabbed our fruit press, poured all of the juice and grape skins in it and pressed them, making a total of six gallons of wine. We added Malic Acid to the wine to mellow out the tannins from pressing. After a week, we racked the wine off of the remaining yeast and sediment, and we will let that sit for three months! Come back then for part two of our 2023 Winemaking series.
Outro
Thank you for joining us for this first of our Winemaking episodes. If you have any questions or tips, please leave them in the comments below. You can also email us at info@adampcampbell.com. Please consider hitting the like button and leaving a comment to help other gardeners and winemakers find this channel. Thank you for watching, and until next time, have a fantastic day!
