Making Wine

Started our first Primary Fermentation today. These are the grapes we planned to use: Edelweiss, Kay Gray, and Frontenac Gris. We ended up only using the Edelweiss, Kay Gray and just a small amount of the Frontenac Gris. We'll try to do a second batch with just those tomorrow or in a few days.....

First we crushed. We opted not to purchase the handy dandy grape crusher as we're making small batches this year and the shopkeeper told us a potato masher would work just fine. It was tedious work though........Stomping the grapes in a big vat was started to seem appealing..LOL!

Here we are with the Primary Fermentaton. We place all the grapes in this reusable mesh bag and the juice can seep out. Brad will occasionally squeeze the bag over the next 24 hours to get as much of the juice out as possible and then we'll be able to discard the contents of the bag(skins and seeds) and be left with just the grape juice....

We also had to add crushed Camden Tablets and Peptin....

Testing to see how many Brix(how much sugar?)

And then he tried to do a 'gravity' test which I guess also shows us how much sugar there is?  I'm not too knowledgeable about all this stuff yet , so I'm not sure how accurate my info is. We are learning as we go...

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog. After a few years of enjoying the Local Wines offered here in Wisconsin, my husband thought it would be fun to venture into Wine-making of our own. I convinced him to start small by planting a small vineyard in our backyard...just to see how much work it really entails and to make sure we enjoy it before going too crazy with a Winery and all that. We planted our initial vineyard last year and the plants just took off. They did WAY better than we had expected. So this year we decided to allow some of the grapes to go to fruit and do a trial run with the wine-making.

So far we've harvested about 100lbs of grapes and we still have almost half of them left to harvest! Yikes!!! So today we went shopping at our local Wine, Beer, and Coffee Supply Store, Grape Grain and Bean, for all of our wine-making supplies. We have enough to get us started   and will probably have to head back in a few weeks to round out our supplies..

 It's exciting to finally be to the point of making the wine. We have 6 different varieties of grapes: Kay Gray, Edelwiess, Frontenac, Frontenac Gris, St. Croix, and Swenson Red. Three are supposed to be for making White Wines and three are for making Red Wines. This year we are going to combine and make a White using all the whites and a Red using all the reds. Follow along as we bumble and stumble our way thru this journey. Neither of us has any real experience with making wine other than taking tours at various wineries in the area. My husband Brad has been studying up on the internet and reading everything he can get his hands on.....Wish us luck!!