Beyond picking of the grapes this has been the most labor intensive stage of winemaking.  After the grapes arrive, you want to get the process started as soon as possible, for the sake of freshness of the fruit.  A good fresh grape is the same as a fresh apple, and its flavor quality declines slowly starting from the time it is removed from the vine.

We received  our sweet and tasty fruit at Mountain Home Brew in Kirkland, and  were a little surprised that 100 pounds of cabernet sauvignon fit into just four boxes. 

First, we ran the grapes through the a destemmer/sorter machine which did exactly what you might expect – it separated the grapes from the stems and in the process mushed the grapes up a bit creating some of the first juice we got our hands on, and enjoyed sampling. It was grape juice at this point, and sweeter than I expected. This part of the process could have taken even longer if we hadn’t had access to this equipment.  I can imagine standing around a sorting table for hours picking grapes off of their stems.

Next, we took our large garbage can of grapes home and asked Liz to jump in and give them a good crushing.  She cleaned up her feet and legs and jumped in.  After about 10 minutes of treading in grape juice, crushing grapes between her toes, and letting her entire legs go numb (the grapes were that cold), we called it good.  At this point our grapes had become “must” or a mixture of stems, seeds, grape skins, and juice.

We added some sulfite to kill off the natural yeasts on the grapes, and before putting the “must” to bed for about 24 hours added some yeast nutrients to nourish to wine yeast we would add the next day.

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