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.

This weekend was busy! Anne and I took Friday off of work because AT&T was coming to install our new internet (and TV, which we'll be canceling when our free preview is up) We also wanted to get some stuff done around the house.

First order of business, on Friday morning the Specific Gravity of the concord must had fallen below 1.030, and you know what that means! Well probably you don't. But for the recipe I'm following it means it's time to remove the juice from the grape skins and pulp. This is what's generally known as pressing, however I didn't actually use a press. One, because I don't have one; and two, because I'm reusing the pulp I wouldn't technically be losing any wine by not pressing it out.

I scooped it out with a strainer.

Once I had removed all of the floating pulp and skins I attempted to rack the remaining liquid must into a 5 gallon carboy. This did not work well because the siphon kept on getting clogged by remaining pulp and gunk on the bottom. I ended up using a large cup to scoop the liquid out and pour it through the strainer and into a funnel into the carboy. When the strainer got too coated with gunk it was deposited in with the rest of the skins and pulp. The gunk got thicker as I got towards the bottom of the barrel, and there were tons of seeds as well. This all went back into the primary fermenter for the second batch. Soon the carboy was full to over flowing. I removed some of it to make room for the bung and for any small foam ups and put that into a small container to use for topping off when I rack this wine. It was bubbling away merrily the moment I put the fermentation lock on it.

Apparently, and I'm not too surprised about this, there is enough flavor in concord grape skins and pulp to ferment two batches of wine from them. Actually as I read a bit more this is not an uncommon practice (with any grape skins/pulp) for making table wines.

Friday night I put together the second batch of concord wine. I'm going to need to name these two differently somehow so as to distinguish them once they are bottled. For this second batch, I added to the existing gunk, a bunch of water, four cans of concord grape juice concentrate (from the grocery store), a bit of grape tannin, some acid blend powder, and ten pounds of sugar. Stirred it all up and let it go. No yeast this time, the pulp from the previous fermentation already had plenty. I'll let this batch ferment until the Specific Gravity reaches 1.010 and then I'll press again (and for real this time) and put this second batch into a carboy as well. Of course before that happens I'll have to get another carboy...

Those grapes I picked were indeed Concords as I suspected. I got about 36 pounds or so, which turned out to be plenty for concord wine as you want to dilute it down with a lot of water because they are very acidic.

On Saturday night we cleaned and destemmed them all and Anne volunteered to give them the stomping of their lives. We learned that the machines that crush and destem for you are probably worth the money; destemming sucks and stomping isn't a whole lot of fun either.

Following the first recipe listed here (times 6), in addition to the crushed grapes I also added two and a half gallons of water and about ten pounds of sugar to the fermenter. Wow, that's a lot!

I do plan on doing the second wine recipe as well, where you take out the mashed grape guts about 5-7 days into the first fermentation, squeeze as much juice from them as possible, dump them into another fermenter and add more water and sugar and ferment again. Very soon we're going to be having a lot of wine in process around here.

The thing about concord wines is they have to age for a long time before they get good. This recipe says at least 3 years, so I guess in 2011-12 we'll see if this wine turned out well. (Maybe I should do the same thing with the cherry wine?)