Wine Making
Grapes grow all over the world, but their natural origin is in certain highlands of the northern hemisphere, in the general area of Europe and east Asia, from about the 30th to 50th parallel that runs from north Africa to Normandy, France.
People have made wine since the Neolithic period, the end times of the Stone Age when humans gave up hunter-gatherer ways, learned how to farm and domesticate animals, and settled down. A few millennia later, the ancient Greeks established an enormous wine trade, loading ships with amphora pottery filled with wine. They were said to prefer sweet wines. Later, the Romans, being the Romans, organized and militarized it — methodically planting grape vines in Spain and Gaul (France) as the legions marched in and conquered the known world. The Greeks and Romans frowned upon drinking their wine neat, and would sometimes even cut or dilute it with sea water. But that’s a story for another day.
Much has changed since the Stone Age, but wine is still made the same basic way — growing, picking, crushing and fermenting grapes to turn juice sugar into alcohol, then pressing the skins and storing the liquid to age sequestered from oxygen before it is fit to drink. I’ve made wine from grapes for 30 years, or a mere 3/1000th of the 8,500 year history of the art. Ars longa, vita brevis.
Grape winemaking is thought to have originated in the Caucasus region near the Black Sea, but no written records exist. Today, there are thousands of varieties of cultivated grapes, but only a fraction are used for winemaking. In the old days, grapes fermented into wine using the naturally-occurring yeast already present on the fruit, while the winemakers of today use yeast prepared under carefully-controlled industrial conditions to ensure consistency as well as predictable fermentation and alcohol levels.
After a couple of side trips to white — and even once making a Dandelion wine (which was lots of work) — I make red wine. The grapes I work with are Cabernet Sauvignon from California (which occupies the 32nd-42nd latitude), shipped by truck to upstate New York and sold by dealers such as Mike Ryan, whose family has sold wine grapes and other produce in Albany since the 1940s. “My grandfather started it back then, saw a little money in it, and saw a lot of Italians coming in from Italy and it just seemed to be a lucrative thing,” he told me. Ryan’s grandfather drove back and forth to New York City, to the Hunts Point market, where he worked with a broker to inspect the loads as they arrived, and picked out the best quality fruit to bring back upstate. I’ve also purchased grapes from Romolo Pede, or Mr. Pede as his employees call him. The Pedes run a thriving family business in Schenectady, New York that makes Italian specialty foods sold in supermarkets. Mr. Pede’s grape warehouse is in Bellevue, a beautiful, gently- rundown section of the once-mighty General Electric factory town.
Why California? New York state grows excellent wine grapes on the slopes of the Finger Lakes, as well as in certain parts of the Hudson Valley and Long Island, but they are not cultivated on the scale seen in California’s Central Valley and Napa. For me, it is California vinifera grapes on the stems — and not the grape juice sold in 5 gallon buckets, frozen leftovers from last year’s harvest.
Making wine is not that hard to do if you know the basic rules and have the right supplies. Check it out online and go to your local home brew/wine supply emporium, if there is one near you, for guidance. My annual winemaking routine in late September/early October goes pretty much like this:
I pick up five cases of grapes, 38 pounds each, put them in the car trunk, then on a hand truck to the backyard. Then I open the cases one at a time, spray them down a bit with the garden hose, and dump the grapes into the hand cranked, made-in-Italy crusher. The grapes fall into a 10 gallon food grade bucket below. Then I take 15 minutes or so per box to pick out the stems by hand — not all of them because they provide needed tannins to the “must” — the term for the juice mixed with the skins, stems and seeds. I find it quicker to take out the stems after the grapes are crushed.
It usually takes me three hours from start to finish to crush five cases and place them in the primary fermenter — a large plastic barrel with plenty of room at the top for the must to bubble up. Once they are in the barrel, it is time to kill the natural yeast by adding a half teaspoon of potassium metabisulphite, an antioxidant and chemical sterilant compound also known as Campden tablets. Mix it in a cup of warm water, stir it up, pour it in, stir the must, then cover the barrel with a lid and leave it for 24 hours
Then add the wine yeast. I use Premiere Rouge made by Red Star. It is a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae originally from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, founded by Louis Pasteur, who invented pasteurization and vaccines for anthrax and rabies. It was once called Pasteur Red, but has been rebranded in recent years for reasons that remain cloudy. But it is said to be the exact same yeast strain, producing full bodied red wines especially with Cabernet grapes.
It can vary from year to year, but five boxes of grapes usually yields 10-11 gallons of wine, about 50 to 60, 750ml bottles. That requires two packets of Premiere Rouge. I kickstart the yeast reproduction by stirring it into a cup of water that is at 100 degrees, then letting it sit for a minute or two before stirring it into the must.
Before describing the next steps, I pause here for a very important point: Sanitation and cleanliness are key to making wine. All equipment must be completely cleaned with hot water at the start and sterilized. I use a powder called Easy Clean, mixed at 1 tablespoon per gallon of water. Get a clean washcloth, and swab the buckets; pour the sterilizing mixture over the crusher. Avoid soap. Yes, the Greeks and Roman didn’t do it this way, but I am guessing they had more spoiled wine. Which may explain the sea water.
As fermentation begins, the grape skins will rise to the top of the must. They should be pushed back down into the juice a couple times a day to avoid spoilage or other problems. Winemakers call it the “punch down.” I use what looks like a two-foot long potato masher to keep the grape skins wet by pushing them down. Violent foaming will ensue, which is why you need some room at the top with your primary fermenter so that the wine foam doesn’t run over the sides. After a few days, the foaming ceases and you are ready to press the grape skins.
Pick a sturdy table outside, set up your tabletop wooden wine press, put the grapes in, and then keep turning the screw, pushing down the skins to extract as much juice as you can. Set it up so it drains into your 10 gallon bucket. As the wine fills up the bucket, prepare to siphon it in a 5 gallon glass carboy that is clean and sterilized. To siphon, take a clean clear hose, which you can buy at a hardware store, sterilize it and fill it with water from the tap. Don’t put your mouth on the hose to draw in the liquid—this isn’t like stealing gas from cars. Have the bucket a couple of feet above the carboy and allow gravity to do the rest.
My five boxes usually fill up two carboys, with the remaining gallon or two put in separate one-gallon jugs. Collect as much liquid as you can and put the pressed skins and seeds that remain into your mulch pile or compost.
Fill the carboys/demijohns up to just below the neck, then close it using a rubber stopper with a hole for a water air lock that allows the fermenting gasses to escape without allowing oxygen in. I’ve outfitted my carboys with handles at the top to carry them and protect them from breakage by putting them in a sturdy hard plastic milk crates. Then I put the carboys in a cool spot indoors out of direct sunlight and watch and wait for the secondary fermentation to do its thing. The airlocks will slow and stop bubbling in a month or so. At that point, it is time for “racking” the wine, where I siphon out the wine, then spray water through a hose to clean the “lees” out of the carboys—the dead yeast that has settled to the bottom. The yeast is specially formulated to die and drop to the bottom when the optimal alcohol level is reached.
Then, again making sure everything is clean and sterilized, I put the stopper and airlock (which is filled with Easy Clean solution) back on the carboy and carefully carry it into my dark and cool cellar. And there it will sit for nearly a year before I bottle it in preparation for using the carboys for a new batch of wine.
The time frame for my 2021 wine: Crushed grapes on October 2, pressed grapes on October 17, racked the wine on December 9, put in cellar then bottled on October 8, 2022.
You can re-use clean wine bottles or buy them yourself. The corks are likewise available to buy. Soak them in Easy Clean solution. Carefully siphon the wine from the carboys into the bucket using a "racking cane" solid tube. The goal is to avoid siphoning any remaining lees. Then attach a spring loaded bottle filler to the other end of the siphon tube (the one not connected to the racking cane). Fill the clean and sterilized bottles with wine, then cork them closed. I use #8 size corks (1 ½ inches long) and a double lever hand corker made in Italy.
This is wine made the traditional way, without the Frankenstein additives used by industrial winemakers, such as Mega Purple (Search it online if you don’t believe me. Also look up “list of wine additives” for an eye-opener.). The FDA is said to approve 76 additives for winemaking here, while the European Union permits 59 different agents and additives. My wine has none apart from the few described above. The wine comes out full-bodied, deeply red and clear, and yours will too if you keep your bottles and equipment clean and sterilized. The wine is good for a few years if properly stored. I like to use a wide bottomed glass decanter to bring out the flavor when pouring a whole bottle.
Follow the ways of the Greeks and Romans and don’t get carried away. In his excellent 2005 book “A History of the World in 6 Glasses,” Tom Standage quotes the Greek philosopher Plutarch’s views on how civilized behavior was expected when pouring wine during a Greek symposion, the drinking party that followed a banquet: “The drunkard is insolent and rude. ... On the other hand, the complete teetotaler is disagreeable and more fit for tending children than presiding over a drinking party.”
Kyle Hughes is an independent journalist and the founder & publisher of NYSNYS News. He's at:
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