How We Used 21 Pounds of Grapes to Make Wine!

so people ask us all the time can you make wine from table grapes the unequivocal answer is yes you absolutely can but will it taste good let's find out part of the reason why there's a question at all is because table grapes are made for eating not really for fermenting where wine grapes are usually smaller a lot sweeter with a more concentrated sugar content therefore you don't need as many to be able to make sugar that's why we got 21 pounds of table grapes from costco that we now have to rinse clean and prepare to ferment so the first step is we have to open up some of these packages well all of them and remove the stems from the grapes [Music] aren't they pretty grapes though [Music] so if you're curious these are sweetums red seedless grapes from costco they do not lie they are sweet and yummy it was at this moment that i started to wonder if maybe we have too many grapes you see i based it off of some information that i found on the internet where they said 20 pounds of grapes makes a gallon of wine and i thought okay 21 will be good just in case there's a few bad ones plus the stems and vines and all that way a little bit not realizing that the water content of this grape is almost double or close to double what it is of a wine grape so looks like i'm gonna be eating some grapes for a while maybe we'll see we got a lot of grapes so i went ahead and got our juicer out and i went ahead and i sanitized each of the elements even the tray and that catches the waste product because in our case there is not going to be any waste now we did rinse our grapes after we plucked them from the vine and just to go an extra step further we actually dunked them into our sanitizer liquid so that way any surface batteries that may have been on there after rinsing them are completely annihilated wow by the way we only have about 12 pounds of grapes done so far yeah i just thought you know this is starting to look like a lot let's start getting some of this into the fermenter and get it juiced and we'll move forward the sanitizer has been sanitized the sanitizer the fermenter has been saying so the fermenter has been sanitized our juicer has been sanitized and our grapes have been sanitized as well as my hands let's get the juices let's get to juicing that's what it's about juicy ollie juicer [Laughter] we started watching the new iron chef on netflix it's wacky the chairman is more crazy than i remember i mean this goes up to 11. yeah this goes to 12. i'm pretty sure so this is a gravity spin juicer so basically it's just gonna spin around like crazy and it's got a grinding element in the bottom juice is going to come out here waist is going to come out there it is going to be really loud so i'm going to stop talking now it also spits didn't know that juice i'll just leave a towel here this may take a while if you're juicing at home along with us make sure not to push pressure onto your plunger you want to just kind of hold it steady and let gravity do the work but otherwise you may burn out your motor also if you find that your grapes are perhaps lighter in density than ours you may have an excess of the pulp remaining with the skins in your offshoot one thing we didn't mention these are seedless grapes too that may make a difference for your juicer i don't know if you want to try juicing the seeds i don't know some juicers might pull them out some might not so if you find you have an excess of pulp remaining on your skins you can take that and reduce it to try to get more juice out but we're putting it in anyway so it won't matter [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so this ended up being quite a mess and one of the things that we have learned as our experienced homebrewers is that one of the best things one of the best things you can have in your personality and your ability one thing everything was sanitized in there that's what was just dripping all over me anyway go on i did that extra crazy just for some special viewers out there um but yeah be flexible learn how to just go with the flow because you might have an idea at the beginning and then this might happen and as you can see we did complete juicing all of our grapes that is 21 pounds of grape juice but there is no room for any of the solids we had foam on top of foam on top of foam we so we did this process where i juiced them and then the juicer cup has this little thing to prevent foam from flowing when you pour it it doesn't work not in this particular instance this has worked in the past but not not for grapes so then we put it in there and we were hoping it would dissipate it did not it was very resilient foam so then we put a brew bag a very fine mesh brew bag in our favorite pitcher and then brian dumped this into that and then put then we rinse this out because of the foam basically we used a brew bag as like a sieve yes and then i squeezed the bag for like 20 minutes to get all the juice out this isn't all of it there was probably another like half a pint but i'm done but rather than looking at this as an issue we're going to look at this as an opportunity an opportunity to tell everybody why we don't use table grapes to make wine right no we're going to attempt to make white wine from red grapes because here's the thing if you use the whole grape meaning the skin seeds stems even and the juice you make red one well if you don't use the stems and seeds and vines and all that kind of stuff you make white wine now they probably use a different method to mechanically separate the juice from the pulp so we may end up with a pink one right a rose yeah it's a rose that's fine um but anyway i wanted to get a gravity reading so here is our gravity reading it's actually kind of impressive i did not expect this 1.080 that's not bad that means given the way we do things that's like ten to eleven percent that's just juice we didn't add any sugars we didn't add any water it's just juice from table grapes impressive actually this is an aspect of brewing that we gloss over probably a little too much get my notepapers and it is very important to take notes on your bruise okay we just use a piece of paper that we cut into strips derek cut them into strips and i'm going to call this table juice wine and what are the important facts that i put in this the date today is june 21st 2022 i will usually put the starting gravity at the top too this is 1.080 then i'll start listing ingredients for this it was 21 pounds of costco grapes we're just going to say that run through the juicer juiced because it is just the juice now could you just do the shortcut buy the juice make this okay we've even done a video on that we just wanted to see can you do this with table table grapes and see if it'd be any good um to this we're also going to add some fermento now i was debating on using fermento in this particular one even though i know it's probably a good idea all the time but once we sieved everything out that mesh bag was really fine that means all the fine particles were gone there was just juice yeah you know what nutrients probably a good idea if we were able to leave all the chewed up pulp and skins and everything i might not have needed it but i'm gonna do it it's not a super high gravity but yeah probably won't hurt so two grams two grams and a little bit of water hopefully there's room then derek i chose our yeast yes and so i have chosen this yeast this is red star cote de blanc premier cote d'ible uh so i actually researched this i looked this up with my handy dandy the research computer that we'll never have handy i grew up looking in the encyclopedia for stuff okay folks so this is like cool and so this is suited for aromatic whites and chardonnays particularly where some residual sugar is desired it just flipped on me it always does that doesn't it though it's slower fermenting uh it's a low foaming yeast we have plenty of foam so that seemed like a good idea all right it is characterized by fine fruity aromatics as i said before it has an alcohol tolerance of 13 so we're safe it's probably gonna go dry most likely most likely it's also made by red star which means it's a terrible packet which is to say that it's not terrible yeah that got to use another tool they also say that it is suited for aromatic whites chardonnays particularly where some residual sugar is desired light young reds and sparkling cuvee so we based on that description alone it sounded like all our bases were covered this is gonna be like a white young red that kind of thing yeah we're good so i'm just going to use a whole packet and what am i doing whack your packet got to get all those yeasty beasties in there i know there's one left all right and i'm just going to give it a little stir get that in there with the wuss the whisk of unusually small size now this is the thin film gasket the foam gasket that sits inside of the lid that creates the seal for this particular fermenter and so i left it out on purpose to show people because i have heard some people say they accidentally threw theirs away don't throw it away this is what's going to create the seal you can get new ones though you can get new ones and some viewers have actually said that they've stacked them to make a thicker foam layer which may help with your seal as well i'm just going to tighten this down a little bit more something like that okay what are we gonna do now we're going to let it sit but we are going to let it sit in a baking sheet with lip just happen to have it ready those edges are going to help collect any spillage that may occur if this becomes an active fermentation which this was messy already yeah so we're not taking any chances i'm thinking blow off tube is in this thing's future we will let you know as this video progresses but for now if i sound a little bit frustrated it's only because we just spent the last two to two and a half hours picking and juicing grapes my hands are sticky okay they've been sticky for like two hours if anyone ever asks why we don't make tape yeah if anybody ever says why we don't use whole fruit this is why okay although i did think of something as we were doing this in the middle of it we were probably three quarters away through and i said no probably could have just used the blender yes we could have also rinsed them really well and then pop them in the freezer for like a day i think we would have had too many grapes because this is actually a gallon and a half now okay that's true so if if you go that route you could probably get away with like 15 15 pounds of grapes which is fine i just went off that 20 pounds just to see sure and hey you know what they're not far off i and i think because these are larger grapes they're more water content they're not as sugared yeah that's where it came from and this route allowed us to get a gravity reading on just the grapes where if we froze them there would be no way to get it yeah if we ran it through the blender we wouldn't be able to do it we'd have to strain it through the bag and we'd end up with much the same thing i think i don't i don't really know how much different they would be but anyway one one thing that we didn't really touch on is the reason why it's kind of a weird thing is because wine grapes are different but when you make a wine like if you make a pinot noir you're using a specific kind of grapes when you make a cabernet you're using cabernet grapes that's the real key what kind of grapes were these sweet something something yummy yeah i mean they're not really a vintage of grape used a varietal that's the word they're not a variety of grape that's typically used to make wines so it may be less than a great one we don't really know we're gonna find out so we'll find out and we'll share that information with you okay nine days in not a lot of activity in the airlock time for its first check first check is done the same as the original gravity reading so really really simple just you know use a hydrometer with a mega maid like we do put it in the graduated cylinder get the reading 0.994 so what we're going to do now is put this sample back in because everything has been sanitized and we don't like to waste anything and we're going to wait one week and check it again one thing i would like to take note of is the color it's not what i expected at all i thought for sure it wasn't going to go white because you know there was enough mashed up skins and stuff because of the pulping process and the juicing process but it's almost like orangey like a rosy orange it's a little bit off it is really bizarre and something that occurred during the process of it fermenting that was even more bizarre is that it turned into like a milk like consistency it was really weird which was really really kind of off-putting so if you are doing a similar thing and you come across that it's completely okay it's just part of the proteins being fermented and reallocating it smells like wine so we're gonna add our reading today's date on our notes and we'll see you in a week all right so we let this go about six days and it's time to take a second reading when we last left it it was at point nine nine four that's 0.994 for those of you keeping track at home and i'm expecting based on that being so low that this is probably done but you know we always like to make sure the number one thing that we get asked in comments and in the vip is did i rack too soon how come my brew is stuck at 1.050 i racked it after four days we get that all the time and i'm not picking on anybody for this because a lot of recipes actually say let ferment for a week then rack they actually tell you things like that well we we've found yeast can't read and different brews work different ways and may have different fermenting times and it could be up to a month or more sometimes so don't take that as a verbatim that's why we like to take a reading once things slow down wait a week take another reading if they are the same and if they are in the range of normality where you expect that it should be done then it's probably done what i mean by that is well you know what i have a video that explains all of that and how to determine approximately where it should end and how so we'll have a link to that 0.994 okay so this is totally totally done so let me make a note of that so now that we've indicated that our brew has completed fermentation now is the appropriate time to wrap this is another thing that comes up all the time do we have to rack do you have to take it out of here do you have to bottle technically no though i highly recommend it if you do not rack you have all the leaves and solids and things like that in the bottom they have a chance to come back up and get disturbed and it could be a problem can you literally just scoop a cup in here and take a drink absolutely you can the problem is storage it's going to be more difficult to store it that's why bottling comes into play you don't necessarily want to store it in your fermenter but bottles are nice and easy and serving sizes things like that if you start getting more headroom in here you have a greater chance of oxidation as time goes on so that's why a bottle smaller serving size works better all right so i poured the sample into the next big mouth bubbler because if you could see this is really really full but i did save a tiny little bit i will say the color changed drastically it started that very very like reddish and then it started going milky yeah and then it we thought it was going to go totally clear i think it's because the mashing up process the pulping process leaves a little bit of skin in there so that's why it got a little bit of red color but i'm just gonna take a quick swig okay this is literally like two weeks old it's not bad it's got a good juicy grape flavor and it's very dry yeah i also did the quick alcohol calculation we had 1.080 to start went down to 0.994 that gives us 86 points 86 points times 135 gives me 11.61 i'm going to call that about 11 half percent abv that's pretty respectable since there's no extra sugar there's no honey there's no other sweeteners just frozen grapes but as we said we're going to rack this now racking simply means getting it from one container to another getting it off those leaves getting it to be more of just the wine itself the way we want it to be packaged if you will these grapes weren't frozen you're right these grapes were not frozen this was the the craziness at costco we got some funny looks buying all those grapes people were like what are they doing oh i mean you know i'm pretty sure somebody went i like grapes as much as the next guy but but it's pretty amazing that just from grapes we were able to get that much sugars that's pretty awesome and i've always heard you know that table grapes are not the best for making wine and i can understand it because wine grapes have been bred for that and they're made specifically for it but based on my initial taste of that there is an interesting thing that and researching the specific varietals of different types of fruit that are bred specifically for fermenting their flavor profile eating fresh versus water bread for eating are very different so like the apples that are specific for apple cider are very tart and they don't taste good they don't taste good the perry pears they're very tart and they don't taste good um but wine grapes are uber sweet right but when i when i took the sample of this it tasted like dry wine and then i got the grape juice flavor oh yeah you don't typically get so much where you think oh that's grape juice from wine so that could be the difference there is that it has that that grapey taste yeah my initial expectation when we saw 0.994 on this was uh we're going to have to back sweeten but i don't know we might not have to we are going to let this sit in conditioning for a while yeah before we really make that determination but so far so good i'll say this too the leaves compacted really really nicely at the bottom the liquid is nice and clear all the way to the bottom there's no like turbidity there's no um you know wispies going all over the place there's little bits of skin floating around and some of that's being sucked up by the auto siphon but that's okay this is the first rack it's all right it's still going to settle out it's going to get racked one more time very very little waste here let me show you let's see if i just tilt that look at that i mean that's a few tablespoons of wastage and i wouldn't even really call that waste because it's pretty nasty though we do know somebody that likes to drink that i don't know how they do it and the next step is cover it up just put the lid back on with airlock we just used the same lid from before there was no reason to worry about it and we want to tighten this down really good and i'm going to give this a little bit of a swirl you should see some activity yeah it was there was quite a bit of gas the off gassing will actually help with flavor it'll help if there's any little bits of sugar left for fermentation which i really doubt it can help with that too but mostly it's to help with the flavor and help uh clear it up a little bit more so uh what are we gonna do with this now we're gonna let it sit see in a couple weeks okay so it's been another week now ideally you like to let stuff sit for a while this is looking like it's clearing out pretty well we're running out of room in the fermentation station so it's time to get this one moving it can clear out a little bit more in the bottle and i'm actually okay with that but for today what we need to do is our tasting that's right we're gonna do the tasting before we bottle it we talked about this in another video that you may or may not have seen yet i'm not sure if this comes out before that or not and the reason being we did so many of these tastings we went oh what if we had done this or what if we had done that well now we're going to do the tasting first we're going to give this a score then we're going to say does it need anything and are we going to do anything to change it up this is the weirdest way to pour glasses so many of you gave us some really great ideas on what to call it and the most common was a p word preliminary it wasn't preliminary it was like pre the pre-bottle it was a fancy word i i i'm it's it's lost it's left the building but anyway that word so we're just going to call it preliminary today the pea taste you know that's a t-shirt in the way and it works right there have you done the p-taste yet okay okay approximately equal in dignity um can we have the airlock back before we oh yeah okay we put the airlock back on because a lot of times people have said and they're not wrong talking over it and things like that could induce oxygen infections that sort of thing i highly doubt it at this stage of the game but it is possible so better safe than sorry the color it is a pretty it's like a rose it's like a rose it's a very pale rose actually yeah it's like a white rose it's not really white there's like i think there's like a pink champagne and this kind of reminds me of that sure now this fermented down to 0.994 okay which puts this to eleven point six percent alcohol right smack in the middle of a normal wine range um it's basically just grapes ferment o and um yeast that's it i'm getting a lot of youth on me i'm getting a lot okay grape on the bouquet i get some youth there's definitely a little bit of um what i what i term the grapefruit scent which is kind of like a young green wine smell yeah not a lot but it's there now this is very very dry so we'll see i'm gonna taste it wow you know okay hold on a second all right time to take a little trip as this enters the pallet the florally kind of almost grapefruit flavors give way to strawberry that's what i am tasting as it enters is strawberry so it's like a straw grape so i get strawberry a little bit of sweetness even it's really odd this is not sweet yet i get sweetness as it enters the mouth now i get a little bit of that astringency from the tannins just a touch of astonishing not not a tremendous amount um the acid level is pretty good i think um and then it goes to sweetness again for me and then it's a very quick clean finish it's actually really nice it tastes like a wine well it is i know it's a ridiculous thing for me to say but i'm just i'm tastes like white wine it tastes like a commercially made wine like all the different levels that a dry wine can bring to you yeah i'm getting from this i just got apricot and peach which i wasn't expecting from just a table grape wine i totally get like a strawberry on the front and apricot and peach towards the end this is this is actually quite nice i'm i'm actually really happy with this i don't think i want to do anything to it for a dry wine particularly one that you'd want to pair with food or even cook with in your food for sauces this would be lovely amazing i'm i am taking it back now remember the whole point behind this was we've all been told if you want to make good wine you got to use the best grapes and while i'm sure that is actually true had we had a real varietal of grapes that was supposedly very very good for making wine we probably would have made a better wine than we did that time i got almost the buttery sensation that you get from chardonnay yeah there's there's a lot of complexity in this that i did not expect at all and i think that's something that you get from using the whole fruits that we don't get when we use juice because i mean the grape juice that you buy is concord grapes it's not the most high pollutant type of grape out there you know for me we're trying we're starting to see this more often across the board in all of our different beverages but whether it be a wine a cider a mead they all seem to have a little extra something when we go through the effort of using actual whole fruit i think it's because you know just like we learned from being whole foods people now uh when you use the whole fruit you're getting everything you're getting the skin the seeds the pulp the the juice right you know everything and there's no extras added so it's unadulterated too yeah i think that using the whole fruit inherently gives you the complexity that you're looking for in a beverage yeah now this is a lot of speculation but there's definitely some truth to that we've seen it multiple times in multiple styles of beverages and so i'm really starting to think well it comes up a lot people ask us what's better the fruit or the juice and now i'd have to say that the fruit is definitely better yeah like without a doubt the fruit is better is the fruit easier no it's annoying it's almost always going to be harder to use the fruit now you could just freeze them and throw them in crush them you could do that sort of thing too i don't know that you get as good of an extraction rate that way you might get a d you'll get a different product because remember we did this through the juicer so the skins and seeds were left behind for the most part some got through obviously by the color had we just thrown them in and mashed them we'd probably have a red wine and would taste very very different right and if we just mashed them and then took all the pulp away we would probably have a white wine yep and that's that's the main differences there i gotta say though i'm pretty pleased with this like i'm actually starting to think of okay what can we do with this now can we take this and add other fruits to it and make fruity i mean the strawberry thing is working it yeah i totally get that and you taste strawberries too yeah okay so there you have it that happens with wine and well food in general your brain tries to fill in the blanks when it doesn't know what something is it says oh you've had this before it tastes like this i think because it's dry but that initial taste like you were saying you still get the there's a florally sweetness there the sweet juicy thing and so your brain goes okay what is tart yet sweet strawberry yeah it doesn't taste like strawberry wine don't get me wrong but it definitely has a strawberry influence if you will it's not super strong but it's definitely there and then later on i'm kind of getting the peach sensation that you mentioned i'm not really eating apricot so much but i could see where the transition between strawberry to peach might read this apricot yeah it's that astringent yep kind of thing coming through um but there's a funny thing that's happening for me in drinking this cause i'm actually getting hungry oh wow because my brain is like oh you could drink that with you are you very much preparing though you really she likes to like take a bite of the food and then have a sip of the wine that she paired with it to enhance the flavors and you know there's nothing wrong with it i think it's kind of awesome i don't have that kind of self-control you know um but she does that and that's why she's getting hungry she has a pavlovian response to drinking wine now that's not a good thing but um well i think it's better for me to drink wine and become hungry rather than eat food and become thirsty for one that is true absolutely i would have to agree with that all right it is time to put a score on this all right so mr perimeter what is your mental parameter for how we should be judging this all right the way we're going to score this one today is scale of 1 through 10 10 being the highest one being the lowest probably won't be seeing an 11 today just saying 11 is reserved for the absolute most amazing thing ever when we've already given a 10 and it just has to be better than that instead 10 just means this is incredible like if i had 20 things in front of me and i knew this was there i'd probably choose this over those other things one means possibly toxic after we shut off the camera we'd probably dump it down the drain then in between is you know one and a half through ten through nine and a half that's varying levels of i'd drink it to not so much okay um i am judging this as it is as a wine this is exactly uh [Music] wow 21 days old today this is three weeks old fresh whole grape juice whole grape wine not just juice whole grape wine from costco no fancy schmancy grapes here these are costco grapes okay i think the label just said table grapes they don't they'll just said anything sweet something i don't know i'm i'm kind of taken back i really didn't think it was going to be any good i i figured it'd be okay no this is actually a pretty nice wine like i could serve this to somebody they'd be like oh what vintage is this you know what do you do i mean i can make up some name like costco backwards or something with a with a number on it you know but whatever um i i i have a number okay i do too one two three seven i was debating between seven and a half and eight that time so i gave this a seven because this isn't the type of thing that i would typically go for right immediately i'm not a huge dry wine enthusiasts though it's growing on me particularly when it comes to food pairings and as brian said i'm all about that so that's that pushed it up to the seven mark for me where typically i'd probably give this more of like a six uh but beyond that i am honestly shocked by the complexity of this beverage it was a really simple build if you want to call it and to have all those different notes that i wasn't expecting come forward i i probably should actually give this a 7.5 to be honest it's it it is it has taken me back and i'm pleasantly surprised and i like to be pleasantly surprised i went eight and no higher because i like things a little sweeter if this was a little sweeter i'd probably go higher but i'm not gonna sweeten it and here's why this is three weeks old at a year this is probably going to be smooth and mellow and wonderful we need to have at least one bottle last a year and then let's do a two year on this because i think at two years this is going to be really amazing we're not going to do two years on everything just certain ones ones that we think either will improve greatly or are just so incredible that we want to preserve that for a two year tasting but this is one of those that i think it's gonna get better over time it's already quite good you can serve this right now and people go wow that's actually pretty nice and even if they didn't know it was three weeks old it just sounds absurd to think that way but it was nice clean fermentation it happened fairly quickly it it's a thing it's a thing and if you think about it a grape is a grape is grape yes there are different varieties with subtle nuances that make them different and work better in different scenarios but if you think about yeast yeast is yeast is east and i know that's a very controversial topic well all the hate mail is going to point out at me and stuff but it's the same critter people yeah they're all saccharomyces cerevisiae and so they have subtle nuances as well to work in different alcohol tolerances to work in different temperatures to have different esters and different flavor and parts but they're very subtle so the fact that we made a fairly decent wine from a table grape rather than a specific varietal grape if you think about it really isn't that shocking fair enough you know it's time to do though let's bottle this bottling as always what we're going to do we're going to take the cap off of the fermenter first and we're going to use an auto siphon to move it from the fermenter into the bottles really really simple some of our bottles are repurposed aka it used to hold a different beverage we drank that beverage and now we're using them again that is the best way to get bottles because you can either look at it that you've got a free bottle that you can use again or whatever beverage came in at the first time was free as you bought the bottle we are also going to be using our bottling wand attached to our autosyphon and did i forget to get that out you forgot to get that i forgot to get that hey guys everything has been sanitized what's a bottling wand you ask good question it is basically a rod of plastic that has a valve at the end that some of them are spring operated some of them are gravity fed i prefer the spring operated one you put that in the bottom of the bottle it lets the fluid flow if you lift it up it stops it that way you don't have to try crimping off the tubing or anything like that to stop the flow while you're bottling you just have to make sure that your helper or your third hand so maybe pushes that down so that it's activated when you start plunging with your auto cycle now i'm leaving the cap on this time because we do have a little bit of fine leaves in the bottom here i could have racked it to a pitcher and rack again but the more you rack it the more chances you are for you have for oxygenating so we're going to just you know go right from fermenter to bottle no problem i just want to get this started we're going yep and then i'm going to let this fall to the bottom of the fermenter very carefully so as to not disturb any of that leaves and i'll take over bottling we'll see you when we're done so as you can see we have a lovely assortment of vessels here we have mostly 750 ml bottles one of these is going to go away for a year another one is going to go away for two years and then we have a glass you might think yeah you guys are just gonna drink that well actually i'm making sausage and peppers tonight and i'm gonna put probably half that glass into the sauce the other half we're gonna drink with it because the wine that you cook with should be the wine that you drink the food with as well because that way they pair nicely together and it brings out the aromas and the flavors but as always guys thanks so much for watching have a great day bye bye

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 33,228

Keywords: table grape wine, table grape wine recipe, wine with table grapes, grape wine from table grapes, all grape wine, all fruit wine

Id: plRBj3_Perw

Length: 38min 44sec (2324 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 17 2022