Monday 2 June 2014

Wine and Vin-garden up date!

Hello!!!  Sorry I haven't added to the blog for a while, I've been too busy gardening and working on the vineyard as and when I can.  I must stress that this project is just at the minute my hobby and anything I do in there happens on a weekend and an occasional evening.  Being busy at work has however allowed me to keep away from the clearing wine from the home vine a lot longer than previous years!

So, the wine has been crushed then fermented followed by the must (skin, stalks and pips) being removed from the vessels.  This happened around three weeks after Christmas.  After this I allowed the wine to sit for a few weeks to naturally settle.  Below shows a photo of a glass demijohn of the wine.  At the bottom you can see the sediment.

You can see the difference between the clear wine on the left and the spent yeast from the bottom of the demijohn on the glass on the right.  The yeast was separated from the wine using a siphoning tube.  


After this, I added wine finings to drag the smaller particles out of the wine.  At the moment (June), the wine is ready to be bottled, it's much clearer and I've sampled it - it tastes great!  This years brew has been darker in colour than previous years which I'm happy with, it has been very colourless in the past.

In other news, I've taken some clones of my vine so I can carry this strain on up to the vin-garden.  I'm fairly confident they'll have a happy, productive life there!  If each of these vines produce the same amount of wine as their mother plant has this year, I could literally swim in wine!




I made a film in the Spring of the garden, it shows a lot of change.  I'll get a new film sorted soon where you'll see the growth and progression of nature (things are growing quick up there).



I've lost count of the amount of the amount of times someone has said to me "you can't grow grapes in Newcastle".  Well, I grew the grapes, made fine wine, made more grapevines and I'm now drinking the wine so kiss my home brew drunken ass!

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