Last year we discovered that we’ve actually got a good supply of red grapes on our vines at the side of the house. After spending hours picking them and eating as much as we could we were at a loss with what to do with the rest of them. Tony decided that maybe we could make wine from them since he’d heard that some of the locals made their own homemade wine and understanding that it could even be quite palatable.
He looked on the Internet and found a site that told you how to make Ghetto wine without having to fork out on all the usual wine making equipment. It seemed like an ideal plan so we mashed up the grapes and placed them into a container so that they could start to ferment. Everyone got involved it was very messy but good fun.
We checked daily to see how the process was going. It was great, the grapes started fermenting and we were in business.
After the fermenting stage had died down we went into the bottling stage. Anything would do we felt, mainly because we didn’t have any proper equipment and we couldn’t find the original web site again. Old wine bottles and plastic bottles were pressed into action.
Bottling went well and we didn’t loose too much of our lovely wine during this stage. It was really starting to smell the part now so we were all pleased with our progress. Only about six weeks to wait now until we could sample our vino at Christmas. It was all very exciting.
Having nowhere else to store our produce, we left the bottles in the kitchen and also partly because we wanted to keep an eye on things.
That’s when the problems started. Bulging plastic bottles and the one part of the process that, as we later found out, we’d forgotten to think about. The gas!!! We later found out you’re meant to have a little u tube affair on the top of the bottle in order to let the gas out and keep the air from coming into contact with the wine.
Anyway not overly daunted by this problem, Tony decided that we could just unscrew the tops slightly in order to let the gas out much as you do with a bottle of lemonade that’s fizzing up. Great, problem solved!!
We religiously did this on a daily basis and all was well in the garden again. The gas that was coming out had a distinctly winey smell to it so we were back on track.
The thing about making wine is that it’s a long process and daily routine took over so the calming down process kind of slipped from being daily to every couple of days or just when we remembered or felt like it.
One morning we were getting ready for our Saturday outing to the market at a town close by. It was the usual chaos of trying to get the youngest children ready whilst trying to get ready ourselves. Tony had gone down stairs to make the morning coffee when there was an almighty pop, clunk and sploosh noise from downstairs.
‘What was that?’ I shouted. The kids were all stunned into silence just looking at each other.
‘Err. Nothing?’ came the questioning response from Tony.
We all dropped what we were doing and rushed down to the kitchen.
Tony was standing there with a bottle in one hand and the lid in the other. He was also standing in a pool of ‘wine’. In fact he was covered in the stuff and looking very sheepish. It was also raining ‘wine’ in the house. It was everywhere.
We used to have a similar experience as children when we made ginger beer. very, very gassy and explosive, but lots of fun