Category: Winemaking 2014

The first batch of Phoenix grapes have been harvested. Here is the historic moment of the first bunch being harvested:

Unfortunately what looked to me like a reasonable amount of grapes didn’t turn out to be very much once picked and put into a bucket. 1.64 kg to be precise. The rule of thumb is you get about two thirds the amount of grapes in kg, in juice in litres. So two thirds of 1.64 is about 1, so I should get 1 litre of juice after pressing. And once processed, I might be lucky if I can get enough to fill one bottle!  Oh well, must press on…(pun intended!)

First the grapes were crushed by hand:

Then they were pressed and transferred to a demijohn. I added some potassium metabisulphite to prevent the juice from oxidising and turning brown. It also kills off any bacteria and stops it fermenting with wild yeasts before the proper wine yeast is added.

It was then left overnight to settle, and the following day I racked it off the gross lees. This left about 800ml of juice. I then took sugar and acidity measurements. SG was 1.071 and TA 0.72%. Not too bad, and not as acidic as the Solaris. 1.071 gives a potential alcohol level of 9.4% so I added enough sugar to raise it by 1% to 10.4%. The rule is 17g/l/% so I added 17×0.8×1 = 13.6g sugar. The last thing to do was add the yeast. I started a culture with Gervin GV9 yeast and some yeast nutrients. The plan was to leave it in the shed to ensure a nice cool fermentation but the night temperatures have suddenly plummeted to around 6°C which is too cold for the yeast, so I am keeping it indoors.

24 hours later and the whole thing is bubbling away nicely.  I’m shaking well every day at this stage as the yeast needs oxygen to begin with.  Once the initial vigour of fermentation has died down a bit (a few days) I will transfer it to a smaller container to keep the air volume as small as possible.

I still can’t help being a bit disappointed with how much juice I have got, but I can only carry on in the knowledge that next year there should be twice as much, and the following year maybe twice again. I’m sure there should be enough grapes of each variety to get a full demijohn.

The Orion grapes were beginning to look like they were on their last legs with quite a few turning brown, and lots of split ones. I also discovered when inspecting the vines after dark that there were quite a few little snails helping themselves to my beloved grapes!

So last night I decided to harvest. Even less successful than the Phoenix with a pretty feeble 0.75 kg picked which was squeezed into 0.5 litres of juice. I squeezed the grapes through a fine mesh nylon bag, as it just wasn’t worth getting the press dirty for.

The measurements were 1.073 SG and 0.69% TA so not too bad, slightly sweeter and less acidic than the Phoenix.

As there was such a small amount, I contemplated just using the juice for drinking (it tasted delicious!) but decided to carry on with turning it into wine. However little I make, I hope to at least get some idea of how the different varieties could taste.

I was planning on blending the Phoenix and Orion at the pressing stage but as they were picked at separate times I had to process them separately too. I can still blend the two later, but I would like to taste them individually first.

So that’s it for the vines now until winter pruning. It’s all down to the wine making now.