2008 Concord second press

Last night I pressed the second wine I'm making with the concord grapes. The SG was getting down below what the recipe I'm following recommended for removing the skins. I had been hesitating because I had no spare carboys to deposit the wine into. I had called a few people selling them on Craigslist but nothing panned out. But it was past time to press and I didn't want to risk compromising the wine any further.

Luckily, I had picked up a beer brewing kit this weekend. While it didn't come with any carboys, it did come with two 6 gallon plastic buckets and a sealed lid with a ferm lock for one of them. I pressed pretty much the same way I did with the first fermentation using the large wire strainer. The only difference was this time I squeezed the skins with my hands to extract as much wine as I could.

I got a lot.

I literally filled the bucket to the rim with wine. I had to take two liters back out to put the top on. I now have something like eleven gallons of concord wine undergoing secondary fermentation. This is in addition to the five gallons of zinfandel that is clearing in the basement. That's a lot of wine!

I also decided to attempt a cold stabilization of the cherry wine to take out some of the acid and hopefully reduce it's sourness. I put it in our fridge, which I don't know if it's cold enough but it's worth a shot. In cold stabilization excess tartaric acid will crystallize and precipitate out of the wine. You then rack the wine off the crystals and you've reduced the acidity. We'll see what happens, the cherry wine may just be destined to become and ingredient in sangria but I have higher hopes for it.