Making New Wine

In this post from earlier this month we talked about picking 32 pounds of grapes from our neighbor's grape arbor.  That's a lotta grapes!  I realized in that post, I promised to let you know what we were gonna do with all the grapes and never did.  Well, I'll make good on my promise tonight.

We've been picking and eating muscadines from our own vines, but with all these, we have a plan.  We decided to make New Wine.  New Wine is a non-alcoholic wine made with fresh grapes.  New wine contains the nutrients of grapes with many enzymes, but none of the alcohol.  We've done this years ago and decided to do it again.  We'll show you how we do it.  We use Jordan Rubin's book, The Maker's Diet, for directions.

We washed the grapes and then ran them through our old juicer.  It is an old contraption, but it does the job.  Tricia fed grapes into the hopper and the juicer juiced the grapes, sending juice out of one spigot and the pulp and skins out another.  It can get quite messy and requires a concerted effort to clean up the sticky kitchen afterward!

I ran the food mill, further processing the pulp and skins to get more juice out of them.  I theorize that this is where a lot of the flavor comes from.  The mill works good, but I bet that if you washed your feet and stomped them in a big vat, that would do the job as well.  (Except that no one would drink the wine).

Here is a look at the grape juice once we were done:

Once we've finished processing, we have a lot of seeds, pulp, and skins left over.  We feed all this to the chickens.  Nothing goes to waste!

The 32 pounds of grapes yielded 2 and 1/2 gallons of juice.  It kind of looks like split pea soup.

To make new wine, you need whey.  Tricia had just made some kefir, so she had some.  She measured out 1 cup of whey for the juice of 32 pounds of grapes.

 and split it up accordingly and poured it into each jar.

Then a Tablespoon of kosher salt total is divided up between the 2 1/2 gallons of juice.

Once this is done, stir to mix in the grape juice, whey and salt.  Cover the jars and leave at room temperature for 3 days.

After two days, cover and move into the refrigerator.  Flavors will develop and get better over time.  It may not be pretty.  It is actually quite an ugly looking drink.  However, it is refreshing and tasty!

What's Kosher About Kosher Salt?

We use Kosher salt a lot.  We hardly ever use regular table salt to season with.  As we were sitting around the island in the kitchen the other day pondering life's enigmatic and weighty issues, we began to wonder, "Why is Kosher Salt kosher?" and "How can a mineral be kosher or non-kosher?"

These are the times that it is nice to fire up Google and ask it those questions. Google will provide answers - pretty quickly.  In this case, Google had 1,850,000 answers for me in 0.84 seconds.  That is a little quicker than getting the Encyclopedia Britannica out.

Anyway Wikipedia tells us everything that we want to know about kosher salt. Kosher salt, as we all know, has a larger grain than regular table salt.  Kosher salt usually contains no added iodine. Surprisingly, nearly all salt is kosher, including normal table salt.  On the other hand, salt can be called Kosher Salt and not be kosher at all!  Confused yet?  Me too.  But then it goes on to tell you that Kosher Salt should really be called Koshering Salt.  The adjective Kosher isn't describing what it is.  It is describing what it does.

Jews aren't supposed to eat anything with blood in it, and it all comes from these verses in Genesis:

Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant.  Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.  Genesis 9:3-4

So this is where Kosher Salt or, better, Koshering Salt is used.  Wikipedia describes it as such:

The traditional use of kosher salt is for removing surface blood from meat by desiccation, as part of the koshering process for meat. The meat is soaked in cool water, drained, covered with a thin layer of salt, then allowed to stand on a rack or board for an hour. The salt remains on the surface of the meat, for the most part undissolved, and absorbs fluids from the meat. The salt grains are then washed off and discarded, carrying away the fluids absorbed.

I like learning little tidbits of information like this.  Thanks Google.