Needless to say, I've been super crazy busy! Plus, I've been working at getting the kids enrolled in a new online school for the coming school year, and the enrollment process was several days work! I really hope this school is worth it in the end.
As part of my fall clean up I defrosted the big freezer and decided it was high time we made blackberry wine. For one reason or another we hadn't made wine in three years, we've just been picking berries in the spring and tossing them in the freezer. Three years worth of berries takes up a LOT of freezer space.
I spent a whole afternoon and evening thawing and juicing this glorious sink full of berries. my sink is NOT actually black... that's staining from berry juice! Juicing blackberries makes your kitchen look like something out of CSI, and as much as I hate chemicals, bleach is my best friend on juicing day. Here is my 15 year old having a turn squeezing processed berries in cheesecloth.
In the end we had about 15 gallons of juice for wine. (Not pure juice, you add a bit of spring water to the mix) 15 gallons of wine! For free!
Once we had our juice/water mixture in buckets we dumped 10 lbs of sugar in each bucket, and got it all stirred up and dissolved.
Then we crushed up a camden tablet for each gallon of juice, mixed it in, put lids on the buckets and let them rest for 24 hours.
The next day I woke up my wine yeast with some warmed spring water, and stirred it into the juice. Yes, I warmed the water on the stove. We got rid of our microwave about a year ago.
Once the yeast was added to the mix the lids went back on, with an airlock added.
Once a day I crack the lids and punch down the yeast. (Stir it all around). And we wait. Eventually we will move the wine from these buckets into glass carboys.
Making wine sounds intimidating, and the juicing is hard work, but the rest of the process almost seems like magic.
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