Most of my friends are aware that I have been, for the past 20 years, an amateur wine maker, and that most of my garage is taken up with wine making equipment.
Since retiring 20 months ago, I have been able to devote more of my time to this hobby, and made (with my closest friend) about 10 dozen bottles of a relatively passable merlot last year.
So yesterday we set out on a road trip to Shiraz Republic in Heathcote to collect an order of 200kg of freshly picked shiraz grapes.
Above is a photo of me at Shiraz Republic in Heathcote, sipping a beer from the connected microbrewery whilst waiting for our order of 200kg of Shiraz grapes to be ready for collection. Don’t I look happy and contented.
Above is what 200kg of shiraz grapes from Heathcote looks like.
Above is the wine crusher (with destemmer included) in my garage.
Another look above at our grapes being crushed.
What 200kg of grapes look like after they are crushed.
After we crushed the grapes, we took a baume reading with our hydrometer to determine potential alcohol content. This indicates that the final product will have an alcohol content of 12%.
We usually wait until March or April to buy our grapes. By then, the grapes are a little drier and therefore higher in sugar content, so we are accustomed to a baume reading suggesting 14% or 15% potential alcohol.
I expect that by getting the first batch of grapes so early, we might get a bit more than half of the 200kg converted into wine (we usually get about half).
It will be interesting to see how we do with this batch.
Lost For Words! 