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!

Juicy Fruit

This is the time of year for picking and eating citrus fruits.  We have tangerines, navel oranges, and now... grapefruit.  We have been eating a bunch.  Their color is vibrant and the taste and tangy and refreshing.  They'll keep just fine on the tree unless a deep freeze threatens.  If that happens, we'll pick them all and store them inside.  Otherwise, we'll 'store' them on the tree.

One of the things that we hadn't done yet, but will be doing lots more of is making fresh squeezed juice.  Tricia bought a new contraption that I wanted to try out.  It is essentially an old fashioned glass juicer that sits atop a jar.  After cutting a tangerine or orange in half, you squeeze the fruit on the juicer.  Theoretically, the juice flows through holes in the juicer and it fills the jar below it.

That's the idea.  Unfortunately, the seeds and pulp stopped up the holes and the juice couldn't flow down into the jar.  First, I resorted to using a steak knife to poke the holes and allow the juice to fill the jar below.  Then, I simply picked it up and poured the juice into the jar below.  It was just taking too long and I'm not too patient.

We save all the peels of the citrus.  In the past, we'd compost them until we made the discovery that our cows and goats absolutely love eating them.  Now, we save them and throw them over the fence and the animals come running to eat them up.

We did get a full jar of tangerine juice with the new juicer.  Truly delicious stuff!

But then I got the old glass citrus juicer and got to work.  It is fast work.  Simply cut the citrus in half, juice the fruit, and pour through a strainer into a jar or pitcher. 

In no time I had a half gallon of fresh squeezed juice!

We had homemade ice cream that past couple of nights and i mixed the ice cream with tangerine juice to make an "Orange Julius."  Pretty good stuff!