{"id":297,"date":"2009-10-26T11:04:17","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T19:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/racking-my-crush\/"},"modified":"2011-01-31T14:00:26","modified_gmt":"2011-01-31T22:00:26","slug":"racking-my-crush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/racking-my-crush\/","title":{"rendered":"Racking my crush"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may recall that I took home some crushed grapes from Calistoga, lo these may weeks ago. I had been keeping half an eye on them, sitting in their bucket in my back porch. I would punch the must back down into the juice, smelling a faint whiff of fermentation. But there was no furious activity, no foaming and overflowing. Probably a good thing, considering how busy I was with the dinner, but I finally got concerned enough to ask Poto who, even if he hasn’t made grape wine, is the closest thing to an expert among my acquaintance. He suggested that, since I hadn’t bothered to measure the potential alcohol level before starting anything, I just taste the juice to see whether it was still sweet. I’ll admit that I had been harboring secret fears that I was going to be giving lots of homemade vinegar out at Christmas, but there was no acetic taint. It tasted, in fact, like wine, although a rather harsh one.<\/p>\n

So I racked it off into a carboy. First I had to extract the giant bag of skins and stems.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The bucket holds seven gallons, and I had significantly less than five gallons of juice left.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(It looks like even less in that photo, but the bucket was more than half full.) I sterilized the carboy and the tube with my Campden solution, then siphoned the juice off of the sediment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Siphoning always seems like magic to me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The carboy wasn’t full<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

so I topped it off with water (which will make for a lighter wine, which is OK with me) and put the whole thing into the dark coolness of my basement vestibule, with the nifty airlock bung to protect it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Now we wait for a while, and hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\nYou may recall that I took home some crushed grapes from Calistoga, lo these may weeks ago. I had been…\n<\/div>\n
Continue reading “Racking my crush”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}