Bottling 29th April

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.

First racking

Friday 26th November
We agreed that we would do the first racking when the first serious cold weather arrived. With a few serious frosts this week, high pressure and a full moon, the time was right. Figuring out how to do it was quite tricky, as you end up with a very heavy bottle of wine on the floor as a result. When we first decanted the free run and pressed juice into the damigiani back in September,  the second one got the lower half of the barrel, so we figured this would have more sediment in it. With this in mind we decided to mix the two bottles together, and racked half of one bottle into a new, sterilized one, and then half of the other one. First thing to do was remove the oil seal with a clever little plastic bottle:

Then using a simple syphon tube, with a metal depth gauge (a kitchen skewer tied on with wire) attached to hold it a few inches off the bottom of the bottle. This worked really well, and we realised the bottles had a shallow raised bit in the middle (think it's called a punt?) so the lees lay in a ring around the edge and the base of the syphon tube was resting just above the clearer middle. Clever.
They tasted very like a good wine, a bit watery perhaps, and slightly tangy. Rachel thought the second bottle was a bit sulphurous; I couldn't tell as I had a cold. It took ages – 50 litres or thereabouts through a slim syphon tube.

One major problem: we ran out of wine. No, we didn't drink it all (although a fair amount was consumed drawing it down the syphon tube!), but after racking off the smaller bottles into the last damigiana the surface was still too far below the neck. So a hasty trip to Somerfields, and I am ashamed to say about 6 litres of 'Fab Cab 2008' was glugged in to bring the liquid up into the neck. Finally a fresh oil seal was added, and plastic caps placed on top. They're still on the floor at this point, we'll have to draft in some extra muscle to lift them onto the bench ready for the next racking, in February.

Topping up and oil seal

15th October
No, not engine maintenance – after the fermentation had calmed down, we topped up the damagiani from the small bottles, and poured in about two inches of olio de vaselina to seal off the wine.

The Pressing

DAY THREE:  Evening...
The last week has been quite cold, but the must smells very potent – definitely something happening in there. The plan was to drain the free run juice/wine out of the bottom of the barrel and transfer it to another barrel . We had put a patch of muslin over the tap hole inside the barrel to filter the juice, but unfortunately this just got bunged up and stopped the tap working completely. So we just scooped the skins etc out by hand and with sieves and put them in the press.

Pressing was hard work (honest!), eventually producing a cake of pressed skins and stalks which was cleared out.

After several pressings, there was mostly just juice in the barrel. We scooped out the remaining skins with sieves and pressed them. Then we unscrewed the tap and let out the juice into a bucket. Our second barrel ended up about half full of the free run and press juice mixed together, around 110 litres? At this stage it tasted like watery wine – but it hasn't finished fermenting yet.

Preparation for pressing

DAY THREE: 28th September – AFTERNOON:

We finish cleaning and sterilizing all the bottles and the press. These are Italian carboys, which Rachel reckons hold about 57 litres.

We're not sure exactly how much wine we'll get, so a few smaller bottles and damigiani are sterilized aswell.

Start to get paranoid about cleanliness. Rachel's already had an anxiety dream about the wine going bad!

2010 Vintage

This blog is a diary of how my friend Rachel and I will be turning twenty crates of grapes into delicious red wine, using traditional Italian methods. Her father was an Italian chef who used to make his own wine at home using imported grapes from Italy. Rachel wants to keep up the family tradition, I want to learn the craft, and we both love red wine!

DAY ONE: 20th September 2010

The grapes arrive: twenty crates of Montepulciano D'Abruzzo in great condition considering the long journey from central Italy.

I calculate about 158kg of grapes, and they're delicious. They arrived quite late in the day so we arranged to crush the following day.

In the background the 210 litre fermenting barrel
drying after being sterilized.

DAY TWO: 21st September


With various children and neighbours assembled,
we begin crushing the grapes, appropriately enough under the canopy of grapes.



The bunches, stems 'n' all, are thrown into
the mangle type crusher perched directly on
top of the fermenting barrel.

Everything gets very sticky. At first juice leaks out down the front of the barrel, and we try various bits of wood to lift the cog mechanism off the lip of the barrel, until a couple of little jenga bricks does the trick!

                                                    Everyone has a go turning the crank.

Any mouldy or dried grapes are weeded out, along with leaves and twigs.

After about three hours, and some refreshment, the barrel is about three quarters full, with a cap of crushed grape skins already formed on top.

 

We'll leave this now for a week to begin fermentation – no added yeast or sugar.