Making New Wine

Our next door neighbor (God Bless Good Neighbors!) called us up on Sunday afternoon and told us that they had picked all the grapes they wanted and we were welcome to go out and pick the rest if we wanted them.  In three shakes of a puppy dog's tail, we were under their grape arbor picking grapes!  We grabbed the biggest bowl we have which happens to be the cover of a Tupperware cake container and started picking grapes.


The Grape Harvest Begins Cue the song, "I heard it through the Grape Vine!"

I like the way this picture turned out with the sunlight shining through the grape leaves.  Speaking of grape leaves, usually during the Spring, we'll come over and pick grape leaves to make Grape leaf rolls, a delicious Lebanese dish that we enjoy.

Clusters of grapes

In no time at all the grape harvest was done and Tricia carried the all the bounty home in an over-flowing 'bucket'.  It really wasn't 'all' the grapes, though.  We ate them right off the vine.  They were juicy, warm and bursting with flavor.  Grapes at the store have nothing on these.


Grape Girl

We immediately started sorting out the grapes.


The Grapes of Wrath?

We separated out the good grapes...

Good Grapes

from those that weren't so good...

This is a sticky job as some of the grapes are over-ripe and have burst.  Some are past that stage and are in raisin form. 

When our job was done we had two colanders full of fresh grapes. 



The yield of the grape harvest

First, we wash them up.  They are full of spider webs, spiders and other little critters that we don't want to consume. 

Washing the grapes

What we're going to make is New Wine.  The recipe came from The Maker's Diet, a book by Jordan Rubin.  New wine is very refreshing and has all the nutrients of grapes found in wine as well as all the enzymes, but doesn't have alcohol.  The first thing we do is put all of the grapes (in batches) into our food processor to puree the grapes.  These grapes have seeds so they'll be in the 'slurry' as well.  No worries, we'll get them out later.
 

Processing the grapes

Once they are all processed, we run them through a sieve and push all of the juice through with a large spoon. 

Grape Juice, skins and seeds

The remainder after we filter is put into a bucket and composted into the garden.  In a little while we'll have a lot of little grape vines sprouting.

Seeds & Skin

There are not many additives to make new wine.  We add a tablespoon of kosher salt...

And a half of a cup of kefir whey that was a by-product of Daisy's milk when making kefir.  In a day or two I'll show you what we did with the curds from the kefir.

 We stirred it all up and then we put it in jars and set it out at room temperature for 3 days.


New wine before fermentation

Sitting out at room temperature for 3 days

Then we put it in the refrigerator.  It is really effervescent and tastes GREAT!  The longer you leave it in the fridge, the better it tastes.  We find it is best after 4 weeks in the fridge.  It doesn't look like it would be good as there is a lot of sediment, but don't judge a book by its cover.  We make sure we shake it up real good before drinking it.  This is delicious stuff and it is good for you.

New Wine aging in the fridge

"There might be a little dust on the bottle.  It's one of those things that get sweeter with time."