It took about two hours, but I managed to strain the must off the skins and ended up with about 80L of juice to go into the secondary. After adding about 15L of water with dextrose dissolved until it had a specific gravity of 1090.

(NB: Photo is before I added the 15L of fluid... 80L of pure grape juice... Ohhh yeah!)

This vessel has an airlock and assuming it stays out of the sunlight (as I'm not fermenting in glass or stainless steel), should be ready in a few weeks or months - once it hits a specific gravity of 1005. There is plenty of available sugar for now.

That's all the hard stuff for now, hopefully I haven't stuffed anything up too badly. Now it's starting to resemble the colour and smell of wine, I'm getting excited about the final product.

Next on the list: Buy 10 cases of 14 wine bottles, bottling, sealing and labelling them when the time comes... :)

After the torture of nearly fourteen hours of destemimng grapes, I was keen and ready to get started to actually make some damned wine.

Having already added crushed campden tablets into the must - for this is the name we give the juice on the pulps - I came back the next day to find that the wine was already fermenting a little bit - Shit! (or as they say in France, Merde!). It wasn't going nuts thankfully, and I managed to stave off the fermentation by adding some more campden - but I'm not sure what taste this is going to impart on the wine - hopefully its not too hard, it would be a pity to have it go to waste this early on in the process.

Now, theres a lot of information out there for winemaking - but I've not come across a very good introductory guide to winemaking. Probably the best two resources are Jack Keller's pages (if you can stand his my-way-or-the-highway attitude), and "The Wine Pages", from which Mr Keller seems to draw frequently. Pretty much everything else seems to be cut and paste from these two sites.

After fixing my natural yeast problem, I've introduced a strain of yeast that's supposed to be good for red wine grapes, especially Cabernet and Merlot. I should note that due to cost reasons, by this point I have put the grapes in together - this isn't the proper technique for blended wines as I understand it (eg: Cabernet Merlot), but I can't afford to spend any more to do seperate batches.

The yeast I'm using is Vintner's Harvest R56. It doesn't require a starter and can go straight in, so I've introduced it to the must and will give it a few days to take hold before proceeding to the secondary fermentation.

From there, it will be a case of straining our the skins from the must and sealing it in an airlocked fermenter. If I can figure out how to do port before this step, I'll fill some of the glass demijons I have for this purpose.

That's it for now, I'll post an update once I've moved to the secondary fermentation - which is going to be messy and interesting also.

I'll leave you with a picture of the grapes during their primary fermentation:

You know what sucks? De-stemming grapes. It really, really sucks. After returning from Margaret River with approximately 100kg of wine grapes, I was faced with the task of washing, de-stemming and crushing the grapes.

If you've done this by hand before, you'll understand why winemaking and brewing stores charge a small fortune for the destemming & crushing machines. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'd seriously suggest ransoming your nerves and getting one of these machines, especially if you're doing a larger quantity than 100kg.

By the time we got the grapes home and inside, unfortunately my developing cold had set in - making this an even more tenuous task. But as I was already worrying about the grapes having been in the back of the car for a few hours without being chilled, I decided to get work underway immediately.

The first two tubs took me around six hours to wash and de-stem, by which time I had realised that the equipment I had for this wine run wasn't going to be enough. Our estimates of how many grapes would fit the tubs was well off, and due to some confusion over the process (more on this in the next post) the primary vat I had was far too small.

After thoroughly washing and sanitising my feet and toenails, I jumped on into the batch and went nuts on the grapes, getting as much juice out of the grapes as I could. After adding some campden tables to kill off the natural yeasts and organisms that grow on the grapes (and hopefully not, but just in case - my feet too), I was left with about 35L of juice and pulp.

The rest of the grapes were then packed into bags and put into the fridges so I could attack them on the following day - after I had been to my local winemaking store and purchased some larger vessels.

Rinse, wash repeat. After spending another small fortune at the brew store, I spent another eight odd hours doing the remaining three tubs and ending up with about 80-90L of juice and pulp, ready at long last to go to step one of the winemaking process!