Grapes Arrived!

We trekked up to Mt. Airy, Maryland this morning, Sunday, October 5, 2008 to pick up 200 lbs of grapes from Maryland Crush. We purchased two 20 gallon, food grade trash cans from Home Depot, loaded them and a few other necessities into John's truck and headed out.


After a quick stop in Purcellville to pick up a side of cow for John, we went Northeast to Rob's house in Mt. Airy. There were two other groups there to pick up grapes when we arrived. We sat back while Rob helped the group of men in front of us to crush and de-stem their Syrah grapes.

When it was our turn, Rob took us to his garage, which was fitted with a huge meat locker like refridgerator. He went in and returned with a lug of Vidal Blanc. We ended up getting four lugs of Vidal Blanc, which topped out at 100 lbs. Unfortunately he ran out of Merlot and so we are going to get 50 more lbs of Cab Franc and Cab Sauvignon when they are harvested.


We got set up on the crusher, de-stemmer and went to town: I poured one lug at a time into the top of the crusher and John hand cranked the crusher, which separates the stems from the berries as it crushes the berries. The must (juice, skins, pulp and seeds) falls through the bottom into a large bucket.



The Vidal must filled 3/4 of the 20 gallon trash can and we added Pectic Acid and Metabisulfate to the must: the Pectic Acid helps to break down the skins to extract flavor and the Metabisulfate kills native yeasts that may be living in the must.

Back at John's house we used the new press to get 6 gallons of juice from the 100 lbs of Vidal grapes. The 6 gallons is sitting patiently in our fermentation bucket waiting for some yeast, which we will add tomorrow.



The 20 gallon trash can filled with Vidal Blanc must.



The Vidal Blanc grape must.



The wine press awaiting some action. We use cheese cloth on the inside of the press to keep the solids from running out.






Juice flowing out of the press into the bucket.



Juice with a few seeds. The juice is incredibly cloudy and does not resemble wine at all.



The wood blocks are used to press down on the must.



Here is what the grapes look like after being pressed.


Six gallons of wonderful juice.