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.