Am writing this four months after the event – life sort of took over, I fitted a new kitchen, Rachel went to Italy, and we've drunk most of the wine since then, but here goes...
We sterilised the bottles in a big bucket of hot water and sterilising powder, and dried them on a clever bottle drying tree from the Wine Empourium in Studley. That was the easy bit.
Using a syphon tube and gravity we simply poured it into the bottles. This was very slow and tedious.
Much more fun was using the corking machine:
We found that screw cap bottles have a slightly larger neck diameter than normal bottles and some of the corks were trying to ease their way out.
Meanwhile upstairs in the inside/outside area the labelling team were hard at work sampling the wine. Oh and doing a bit of labelling.
They were printed on slightly embossed conqueror paper on an ordinary printer, and stuck on using wallpaper paste. This worked well, the printing ink running only if you used too much paste. Also have the advantage of being easy to soak off for next year.
The finished result – a light, fruity, drinkable wine with a hint of fizz, beautifully clear and quite potent. We never measured the grape juice at the beginning so can't work out the strength but it has the same effect as shop bought stuff.
Why 'Vino d'Uva'? Literally grape wine, but for a true appreciation of the culture this style of wine making comes from you have to read
"Extra Virgin" by Annie Hawes.
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