Urban Forage Wine

I often get grapes from a friend to keep the wasps away from their yard. I did a batch in 2020 and 2021, which were sour and alcoholic, but I liked the taste of. In the fall 2023 vintage, I added some toasted French Oak chips, and this vintage tastes much more like a traditional wine. (Scroll down for pictures and process of 2023.) The 2023 vintage is bottle aging; if you want a taste, it's young but drinkable.

In Process:
In 2024, the grapes were the bluest I've seen yet and I'm going to try to do half modern and half period methods for dealing with particulate to see how they compare. 

2024 Vintage

I went over to collect a small (hah) amount of grapes and pears from my friends' yard, since our deep freeze is already full. I ended up with more fruit than last year, because the grapes looked soo good. I commented that many bunches looked like the platonic ideal of grapes. We spent about an hour climbing around trying to get all the best bunches. In the third photo, that's a 6 gallon bucket, a 2 gallon bucket (both squished to add more grapes to), and 4 paper bags of various fullness of grapes - so 15 gallons?

When I got home, I decided to see if the kuurna I used for sahti also worked for this. I blocked the drain hole with some grape stems, and started piling the grapes in, taking large stems out and crushing the fruit some as I went. (I ended up needing to pull out the stems from the hole later.)

I got a loose 6 gallon bucket of stems, and probably another 6 gallons of skins and small stems, and about 6 gallons of juice. 

I also tried to get gravity to help me squish the juice out, but between being impatient and not really wanting to let the grapes sit out where there were a ton of flies, I set up the cookie sheet for a short time, and then moved on to squeezing by hand, like I've done previous years. (Next year, we might try to borrow or make a fruit press to see if I can get more juice with less work. A lot of the skins I threw out were still quite juicy.)

When I put the juice in the kettle, there were still a ton grapes that had fallen thru the hole. With a strainer and slotted spoon, I think I pulled 2 gallons of stems and skins out of the boil kettle before it got too hot. 

After I boiled the juice, I left it (covered) overnight to cool down. 

The next morning, the juice was only warm to the touch, so hopefully that's not too hot for the wild yeast from the skins. I left a layer to cover the bottom of the bucket(s) to hopefully transfer the yeast and more flavor. 

Each bucket was about half full juice, and then I added a pitcher of water per gallon (as an estimate). 

The big bucket is going to be trying to replicate the wine I made last year - French oak chips, pectinase to clarify - modern techniques. The two small buckets I plan to use as experiments to see how a couple period techniques for clarifying might work. 

Oct 19: 

I need to pick a day to fuss with this. I opened the buckets to check while I was doing other things today, and I think it's doing the same thing the plum wine was doing. 

Nov 9

I realized that the period clarifying techniques I wanted to try need to happen at boil time, so I went ahead and put pectinase and potassium metabisulfite in both carboys I racked to today. 

I intended to add french oak chips like last year, but instead of lightly toasting them (for sanitary reasons as much as flavor) I burnt them black and set them on fire. Ooops. I let them sit in the smaller batch for the morning, but then left them in the bucket when I racked to the carboy. I guess we'll see how it affects the taste. (that carboy is only a gallon, the other is the larger 5 gallon carboy. 

2023 Vintage

Thanks to help from Phillipe de Greylond and Mergret, I figured out to add pectinase to clarify this batch (after several months of ignoring it in confusion). Below are the pictures of the wine as it was summer 2024.

Thanks to Otto Gottlieb for coming to hang out and help with bottling!