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...