Patrick Pince

2011-11-01T11:38:00.001+01:00

After pressing the red grapes I took away a small bottle of the juice. Already with only 2 weeks in the vat the primary fermentation - where the yeasts turn most of the sugar into alcohol - was complete, more or less.
The secondary fermentation - where bacteria turn most of the remaining sugar into alcohol - will continue slowly.

The taste of the juice was of wine, but very "raw". After a day or two, I poured off the clear wine from the bottle into one glass, and the "lees" at the bottom of the bottle into another glass. The contrast is clear. This lees consists of sediment from the grapes as well as dead yeast cells.

This is an example of what is in the barrel at the moment. The lees tasted more or less the same, but didn't look very appetising!

This week we will rack the white, maybe the red too.

Some pictures from the red grape pressing

2011-10-19T19:19:00.003+02:00

The red grapes (actually some white too) had sat in the vat for 2 weeks to macerate (get the colour out from the skins). Early on a cold sunday morning we pressed them.

The vat had been covered to keep off the fruit flies...

The partly crushed grapes float to the top. Every day the "cap" needs to be pushed down so the oxygen can get at the juice and help it ferment. After 2 weeks the primary fermentation is mostly complete and most of the sugar will have already turned to alcohol.

All the grapes are thrown in the press and the screw is turned. This press is a bit too big for a quantity of only about 100l.

The trick is to turn the screw so it won't easily go further, wait a minute, then it is possible to turn it again... and repeat for the best part of an hour.

When it doesn't seem practical to keep pressing, dismantle the press and remove the cake of grapes. In fact they are still a bit juicy and if there was a large enough quantity it would be worth pressing them again.

The pressed grapes get thrown back onto the soil...

And finally the barrel is (almost) full. About 90l in this case. After racking a few times it might end up about 70l. The first racking will be later in the year.

Harvest

2011-10-12T20:51:00.002+02:00

After a disastrous 2010 when we made no wine at all, this year things got back on track.
The quantity is about half of 2009. Let's hope quality wins over quality!

During September and October we had three separate grape picking occasions.

At the very start of September, the Muscately grapes were already ripe and the wasps were starting to eat them. As there was only a small quantity, the girls pressed them by foot and we squeezed the remaining juice out by hand. Slow work. As we started in the afternoon, it went on into the very warm evening. The must was very sweet, about 19 degrees sugar. It was only about 30 litres, so I used a 50l plastic container, and added a small amount of sugar - about 800g - to bring it up to the desired 21 degrees - the ideal level for starting the fermentation, which should result in a wine around 12.5 degrees of alcohol.

Having covered it to keep off the fruit flies, it sat - with occasional stirring - for a couple of weeks before it was racked into a 25l glass 'carboy' jar. This year I wanted to make a small quantity of wine separately from the rest, and store it in glass, so the process is more visible. The problem with storing it in a barrel, is that during the time when it ferments and settles, it isn't possible to see the separation of the clear wine and the 'lees' which float to the bottom (dead yeast, dead bacterial microbes, and other gunk). And it means that racking off the clear wine without disturbing the lees is more difficult. Finally, by keeping a small amount of wine separate, it will be interesting to compare the eventual taste of the wine versus the main bulk.

Then in mid-September the bulk of the white grapes were picked and pressed a few days later. This year it resulted in only about 250litres compared with nearly 500l two years ago. I'm not complaining too much. Most of the white from two years ago is still sitting in a barrel (although much less than the original 500l after multiple racking). This must was 18 degrees, to which 8kg of sugar was added. These are currently sitting in two barrels a little over 100l each, until they will have their first racking in November.

And finally, a week ago, we picked the red grapes. There wasn't enough quantity to setup the machine which takes off the stems, and we had enough labour to do that by hand, since we were celebrating Györgyi's 40th birthday that day.

The lightly-crushed red grapes are currently sitting in a large vat for 2 weeks. Unlike the white wine, to produce a red wine, they have to sit and macerate for 2-3 weeks before the pressing - this means the colour needs to come out of the skins. If they are pressed a few days after picking - like the white grapes - a rosé will be the result. On the coming weekend we will press them. My estimate is about 100 litres. Actually we mixed in white grapes from Györgyi's mother's garden. Otherwise it would have been only around 50 litres. Two years ago we had 100l from the red grapes alone. The red must was 17 degrees, to which 450kg of sugar was added.

In the next posts, I plan to write about the books I've been reading about winemaking and how they are starting to influence my thinking about how I want to make the wine in future.

Back to business

2011-10-09T16:58:00.000+02:00

After a disastrous year in 2010, 2011 was more successful.

Posts to follow...

No harvest

2010-10-21T17:11:00.001+02:00

There was no harvest this year, as a result of cutting back and spraying too late, combined with bad weather conditions. Very few grapes grew, and most of those had mildew.

4 buckets were all I picked, most of which we put in a juicer rather than eat.

This year to buy grapes for winemaking costs twice of last year, about 150 Ft/kilo (50 Eurocents) - that's considered very expensive.

Some more pics:

Some nice baby carrots and end-of-season apples though!

Not a great year for fruit

2010-08-29T20:23:00.000+02:00

This year the fruit trees mostly are not very productive. There were almost no cherries, we have very few apples and not a large amount of peaches - two types, one with white flesh and the other with orange flesh. On the other hand one of our trees is laden with big healthy-looking pears and there are a lots and lots and lots of plums - Györgyi already dried some and made loads of jam.

The few apples and peaches we got look nice though :-)

Tartar

2010-08-26T19:43:00.000+02:00

While racking the white wine, a piece of 'tartar', or 'wine stone', fell out from one of the barrels. It's about 1.5cm wide.

It's a lot of work

2010-08-23T22:15:00.000+02:00

In the springtime we met people from Budapest who had bought a neighbouring piece of land. They spent a morning pruning their vines. Recently I noticed their land is completely overgrown and they have no fruit. I guess they gave up when they saw the amount of work needed to maintain the vines.

Not that I can talk, since Sanyi does all the heavy lifting :-)

Stainless steel storage container

2010-08-21T09:58:00.000+02:00

We racked the white wine again in July. We had two barrels originally of white. After disposing of the lees, the remainder almost fitted into one barrel except for about 40 litres or so. Not sure what to do with this at first, I remembered the wine storage container I was given as a gift a couple of years ago. I went off to get it and cleaned it quickly. It stores 30 litres and the rest we put in some plastic containers.

The storage tank came with a bottle of paraffin which I had been told should be poured on top of the wine to preserve it. Now, the idea of pouring paraffin on top of my nice wine was pretty scary, so I didn't do it. Afterwards I got in touch with a distributor in Australia who confirmed how to use it, so will do that next time I'm at the cellar. This picture doesn't show that top of the wine is a floating lid, around which there is about a half mm of space where the paraffin should go, and then the main lid is placed on top.

This stainless steel storage container was manufactured in Slovakia. When I searched for such containers on the internet I found very very few links, and interestingly one of them was in English from a distributor in Hungary. My guess is that for home winemaking these are not widely used, although (larger) stainless steel containers are commonplace in commercial production today.

I'm looking forward to tasting this wine now it's been in the container for a couple of weeks (without paraffin on top) to see whether or not it has gone off. Hopefully not, although as the white is a bit acidic in the first place I won't lose sleep in case it is.

Poor 2010 harvest expected

2010-08-18T20:46:00.000+02:00

Unfortunately we will have a poor harvest this year. The vines were cut back too late and sprayed too late, which combined with the mixture of hot and wet weather means many of the grapes have not developed. Probably we won't have enough to make it worthwhile making wine.

Refermented?

2010-07-17T21:17:00.001+02:00

When we opened a couple of our recently-bottled bottles, bubbles appeared in the neck. I also notice a few bubbles in one of the bottles lying down. It tasted fine, but perhaps the following is the problem. Maybe as a result of the wine getting too much disturbance and oxidisation during the bottling.

Refermented
Fine wine is a living thing, the product of controlled fermentation. Occasionally, some residual, dormant yeasts will wake up, and a wine will undergo a second fermentation after it has been released and shipped. This manifests itself as effervescence, or fizziness, on the tongue. Of course, this is desirable in champagne (which is purposely refermented in the bottle in order to create the bubbles), but never in fine still wine.

http://nymag.com/restaurants/articles/wine/essentials/badwine.htm

Lessons learnt

2010-07-02T07:15:00.001+02:00

This weekend I plan to open one of the bottles we bottled four weeks ago and see how it tastes.

There are a number of things we could have done better, at least in theory. Before putting the wine into them, the bottles were simply washed out with water and just left upside down in the sun for a while. So we're not talking about a perfect sterilization here! Then we used a garden hosepipe with a funnel to fill the bottles, with my thumb over the end to control the flow - this means the wine gets oxidated a lot which isn't good for it - the more correct thing is a narrow tube which you insert to the bottom of the bottle and I guess you can pinch the tube to control the flow. And it was only after putting corks into all the bottles that I remembered the shopkeeper told us to soak them in water overnight beforehand... although considering cork resists water I can't see this making a giant difference. Well, lessons for the next time.

The costs were not massive. Each bottle costed around 120Ft (40 Euro cents), and the corks and foils costed very little. Fancier coloured glass bottles would have been a bit more, about 160Ft, but for a red wine which will be stored in a cellar, colour wasn't important. The investment was the corking machine at 15000Ft (50 Euro), and it was worth it - there are cheaper models available but harder to use.

However even with considerable economy of scale, I cannot see how professional wine makers can make a profit producing wine which retails on the supermarket shelves for as little as a few hundred forints a bottle .

Bottling in pictures

2010-06-12T18:06:00.001+02:00

Last weekend we bottled the red. I hadn't done much preparation and afterwards realized I did most everything wrong. I'll write more about that later.

Still, we now have 91 bottles and took away an additional 8 litres for quick drinking.

Here are the highlights.

First wash the bottles...

Dry them...

Down into the cellar...

The target of our affections...

Prepare the funnel...

Start siphoning...

Resist the temptation...

In go the corks (no action shot)...

Always important ... an attractive young lady to market your product...

On with the foil caps...

And pile 'em high...

Greener and greener

2010-05-30T18:05:00.000+02:00

Little grapes start to appear:

Cherries too (and strawberries from the neighbour):

Spring is in full flight

2010-05-16T05:54:00.001+02:00

The vines are now really in leaf.

Pruning and 4 weeks later

2010-04-28T07:06:00.002+02:00

On the last weekend of March the pruning was done, we racked the white wine, and I took lots of nice pictures. Then most of them got deleted when my external HD got confused. Only a few remainded...

A big pile of small branches:

A small pile of big branches:

A blood red sky at the vinyard:

And then.... last weekend, just 4 weeks later, I got a surprise. All of a sudden it seemed like the season changed and the previously barren-looking vines are covered with opening buds.

This unwelcome cserebogár/cockchafer had his meal interrupted...

Spring has sprung

2010-03-22T17:21:00.002+01:00

Not much happens over the winter but now the spring is here the work begins again. The vines are budding and this weekend I'll get to see how they look. They will be severely cut back to encourage new growth. Also the wine needs to be racked again. I'm thinking of bottling the red as I'm concerned that once we rack it (it currently fills the barrel right to the top) there will be air inside the barrel which is unlikely to improve its quality over time. For that I'll need to buy a bottling machine, don't know how much that costs yet but might be a good investment. And of course I'll need about 100 bottles too.

Meanwhile I have a couple of items which severely test my Hungarian language knowledge.

An thriller on video - The ABC of Pruning - something I won't personally be doing!

And a nice old book about grapes and wine:

... this page is about racking:

Ain't nothin' going on but the snow

2010-02-14T17:40:00.000+01:00

Harvest prediction not good?

2010-01-23T11:21:00.000+01:00

St. Vincent’s feast day is January 22. Traditionally, mild weather on St. Vincent’s day lead to good crops. Unfortunately it was some degrees below zero.

In some places, on this date a cutting can be made of from a vine and if the buds are not damaged by the freezing winter weather there is good hope for the harvest.

Hungary: Its Fine wines and Winemakers

2010-01-15T11:08:00.000+01:00

My wife gave me the book Hungary: Its Fine wines and Winemakers, by David Copp for Christmas. It's got some really excellent depth about the history of wine production in Hungary, grape varieties, and individual growers.

It contains an interesting story about the socialist years. Due to central planning, Russia had the job of producing tractors. These tractors, designed to mechanise wheatlands, were 3.5m wide. Hungarian vineyard rows were less than 2m apart, so to mechanise them and accomodate the tractors, every other row of a vineyard had to be uprooted, to make rows 4m apart. However, since the goals of wine production at that time were focussed on quantity rather than quality, many more vines needed to be planed on lower-quality sites. The result was the replacement of high-density planting of old vines on the best hillside sites, with low-density plantings of heavy cropping varieties on inferior low-level sites. The book says that this was considered a successful approach in Party quarters - production quotas were maintained and there were no complaints about the quality of the wine. Of course, I presume complaining was not recommended in those days!

The Hydrometer and how she is used

2009-12-21T17:21:00.001+01:00

The hydrometer is one of the most critical pieces of equipment for wine making. It measures the sugar content in the "must" - the pressed grape due prior to fermentation - allowing the wine maker to predict and if necessary influence the level of alcohol in the final product.

When I originally used the internet to look up information sources on the hydrometer, I found that many different scales of measurement are used. On top of this, descriptions of wine-making in English often use Imperial measurements - and obviously in Hungary we don't! So although the basic principle of the hydrometer is very simple, it took a bit more reading than I expected to get a full understanding of its usage.

This most excellent page gave me quite useful information on how to use the hydrometer, although since this page is based on imperial measurements and specific gravity, neither of which our hydrometer uses, I had to do some mental adjustments to take it all in. Luckily there is a conversion table.

Our hydrometer is shown below, after we pressed the white grapes and then the red. It shows a sugar level of about 18 for the white must, and 19 or so for the red must. An ideal level for the fermentation process is around 20 to 21. The reason grapes are left as long as possible on the vine before picking is to naturally maximize the sugar level. This summer was very sunny so most people picked the grapes a little earlier than last year.

Now a bit of technical stuff...

The Hydrometer works on the Archimedes principle that a solid suspended in a fluid will be buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced. Thus, the lower the density of the substance, the further the hydrometer will sink.

Hydrometers are used in fields other than wine-making, with varying measurement scales. In wine-making alone, there are at least 3 scales used. In English-language information sources, "specific gravity" is most commonly used. Our hydrometer - apparently the common type in Hungary at least in amateur wine-making - is based on the Brix scale. Degrees Brix (°Bx) is a measurement of the dissolved sugar-to-water mass ratio of a liquid. A 20°Bx solution is 20%, with 20 grams of sugar per 100 grams of liquid. Or, to put it another way, a measurement of 20°Bx means 20 grams of sucrose and 80 grams of water in 100 grams of must.

Applying this in practice, the measurement we collected from the white must was 18 degrees. We added sugar to bring it up to an optimal level of 20-21 degrees for making this white wine. In the above-mentioned page about the hydrometer - which uses Specific Gravity rather than Brix scale - 18 degrees brix corresponds to 1.075sg, and 21.4 degrees brix corresponds to 1.090sg. That source says that fermentation ideally starts around the 1.090sg level.

A factor to consider is "potential alcohol", meaning the potential alcohol level of the finished wine after the yeasts convert all the sugar to alcohol. 18 degrees brix corresponds to a potential alcohol level of 10.2%, 21.4 degrees brix corresponds to 12.2% alcohol. This is a desirable level for a white wine. For contrast, a dessert wine would target something more like 16%.

Since in both cases our sugar levels were good, but too low, sugar (just regular table sugar) was added to bring it up to the ideal level of about 20 to 21 for the fermentation process.

One final thing. In the pictures of the hydrometer above, you can see "20°" written on it. To confuse matters further this is nothing to do with the sugar level but rather the optimal temperature of the must when the hydrometer is used. That is, the hydrometer is calibrated based on a must temperature of 20° - so if the temperature is significantly different, then one needs to make manual calculations to determine the actual sugar level. It's unlikely that our must was 20° when we measured the sugar levels, but no-one seemed to care. In any case, the amount of added sugar was also based on quick mental calculations - so for an amateur wine it seems not to matter too much. I guess the pros take it more seriously!

Chemicals

2009-12-02T17:47:00.000+01:00

Everyone seems to uses chemicals on their vines and other fruit trees to ward off fungicide and pests. If one questions this, the response tends to be a bit dismissive. On the other hand, in Hungary there are a number of Organic/Bio wine producers. It would be nice to get rid of these chemicals some time in the future, even if it means a somewhat reduced crop.

Disinfecting barrels using sulphur

2009-11-28T17:49:00.002+01:00

When I posted about racking the barrels, I mistakenly wrote that burning the sulphuric strip ('Kénlap') inside the barrel, prior to putting the wine back in, was to clear the oxygen out. I hadn't been sure about that, and subsequently read that it is actually to disinfect the barrel.

The image below from bkwine.com shows what the pros use - a wooden plug with an iron wire attached, that is used to burn sulphur pellets inside the barrel. This seems safer than the method we used - attaching the sulphuric strip to a piece of wire and lowering it in and out again with great care not to drop it into the barrel - because if that happened it would be a nightmare to get it out!

Next racking will be in January. Until then, nothing much to do except enjoy the new wine. Luckily, the time of year for mulled wine is now upon us. Since the white wine is not as good the red, I think we'll be mulling over that...

borkő

2009-11-15T20:15:00.001+01:00

While we were rolling the barrels back into position, before siphoning the wine back in, I heard a noise like there would be a fragment of metal rolling around inside the barrel. Sanyi said it was "borkő". Although I didn't know exactly what this is, I got the idea, since it literally translates as "wine-stone" (and I knew vizkő - which literally translates to water-stone - means calcium). So I guessed it must mean something that crystallizes from the wine.

I looked it up later and it means "tartar" in English, used in cooking as "cream of tartar". Technically, Potassium Bitartrate. This crystallises in wine casks during the fermentation of grape juice. It is a product of Tartaric Acid which is the most plentiful acid found in grapes. This chemical is relatively rare in other fruits and is one of the keys to the suitability of grapes for winemaking.

You can sometimes find it in bottles too.

St Marton's Day and 2009 újborok

2009-11-12T18:02:00.002+01:00

On St Marton's Day, when Goose is the traditional thing to eat, we went to Borbíróság for dinner. Given that just last week we had tasted our own 2009 for the first time, a nice attraction on the menu was the 5 "újbor" - just released 2009 wines.

We tried both reds and one of the rosés. From the reds, I preferred the Vylyan Bogyolé. It's name means "berry juice" and is a clever play on the word Beaujolais as it's made in the style of Beaujolais Nouveau - it was smooth and more full bodied than the drier "Bock Szent Márton bora". It was also more similar in taste to our own homegrown red (which doesn't do so badly in comparison in my humble opinion!!!)

The "Dúzsi Tamás Primőr Rosé" was also delicious - very fruity.

And we had some very tasty goose too! Their Márton Napi menu (pdf file) is available for a week or so.

Racking

2009-11-07T18:49:00.001+01:00

Finally I've got something to write about again!

Yesterday we racked the barrels, and hurrah, the wine is somewhat drinkable. I wasn't expecting that so soon, making it was a nice surprise, even if it needs more time to become clear and develop some character.

Racking in Hungarian is "féjtes", which might be related to the word for head, "fej", as racking involves separating the good wine off the top of the barrel from the sediment,or lees (üledék in Hungarian), at the bottom. If the wine is left too long on the lees it can develop an off-taste. The phrase "sur lie", which one might encounter for example on a Muscadet bottle, translates from the French as "on lees", meaning a wine bottled directly from the barrel without racking, which gives a distinctive yeasty aroma and taste.

I travelled down in the rain to Siófok, dropped off one of the daughters at the grandmother and headed off to meet Sanyi Bácsi at the cellar.

Sanyi had already been there a little while. With the help of another man who had been there earlier, he had siphoned off the red wine into a large plastic container (a lot larger in practice than it looks in the picture below!) and thrown out the gunk - the sediment, - that had accumulated at the bottom.

Together we washed out the barrel. Or to be more accurate, Sanyi did the hard work and I carried the buckets. This was slow. It involved pouring in a bucket of water, plugging it up, rolling and shaking the barrel around for a minute or two, then draining out the water. And doing it again and again, until the water came out reasonably clear.

Next, turn the barrel upside down and let the remaining water drip out. And wait for the barrel to get dry.

While waiting, we moved onto the next barrels. Luckily the first barrel was dry by the time we needed the first large plastic container again to drain off the third barrel, as we had only two such containers.

Once the barrel was dry, the next step was to put Kénlap (a sulphuric strip) on a piece of wire, set it alight, lower it into the empty barrel, push in the bung quickly, and wait until it had burned off before removing the bung again. The stink this gave off was overwhelming and made us cough. Healthy work...

The purpose of this step is to remove oxygen from the barrel, so the wine won't oxidise after it is put back in. As the wine is put back, the gas comes out.

Once that was done, we could finally siphon the wine back again into the barrel from the plastic container, and the first barrel was finished.

Having missed out on draining the first barrel, when we started on the second, I discovered that this step is quite time-consuming too. It's because the plastic containers are in the "présház" on a higher level than the cellar. So while it's easy to siphon back from the containers into the barrel, it's obviously not possible in the 'up-direction'.

So, we siphoned the wine from the barrel into buckets with a length of hose pipe, quickly swapping the buckets when they filled up. While one of us was doing the siphoning, the other was carrying up the buckets and emptying them out into the plastic container. But that was the easy part, because at some point the flow from the hosepipe becomes too slow. Then we had to take out the bung from the front of the barrel and let the remainder flow out. This isn't so easily controlled as siphoning, so we had a row of buckets ready, and quickly filled them up one after the other, until the barrel was empty.

As the bottom of the barrel is reached, the wine becomes cloudier. The last bucket of all is a murky mud-like gunk. I was surprised how horrid it looked, having expected something more like the sediment that collected at the bottom of the must when we pressed the grapes! The lees consists of deposits of dead yeast or residual yeast and other particles, as well as the sediment from the grapes. The pictures below shows how delightful the lees looks!

So on we went with this process until the three barrels were finished. They will sit there to let the wine clarify and we can repeat the process until the wine is crystal clear.

The 105 litre barrel on the left is full to the brim with all our red; the next one - 200l - is full with white; and the last one - 300l - is not quite full.

The wine is drinkable, although further settling and racking is needed to clarify it, and develop its taste. The white is a bit acidic unfortunately. The red is quite alright - albeit lacking any depth or character.

So, a few takeaways:

And in the picture below you can see how cloudy the white is. I don't know how alcoholic is the wine, although probably the majority of the sugar has turned to alcohol. I wanted to use the Hydrometer to test the sugar level but I was told it only works on the must ... not sure about this because it contradicts with what I read. Anyway, I guess I'll just have to drink a litre and see how I feel afterwards :-)

Theory vs practice

2009-10-15T18:40:00.001+02:00

One of the curious things that I still don't quite understand, is the difference between the actual process of wine making as I am seeing it, and the "theory" I read. This may be in part because a lot of the resources on wine making in the English language are about making wine from fruits other than grapes... not too surprisingly since I guess grapes are not as widely grown in family orchards in the English-speaking world as in mainland Europe. And from what I've read, it seems that grapes are really the perfect fruit from which to make wine (surprise surprise)- to make wine from every other fruit requires addition of something to the process, e.g. yeast, and perhaps more attention to detail.

One example is sterilisation. I read that everything should be perfectly sterilised. In practice nothing at all is sterilized, there were lots of flies around during the pressing stage, and most of equipment is hardly what one would call hygenic (in fact, best not to think about hygiene at all). The assumption seems to be that anything nasty simply gets killed off during the fermentation, or removed during racking.

Another is keeping air and fruit flies away from the wine, to prevent oxidisation. I read that it's critical to use airlocks that keep the air (oxygen) out from the wine but release gases from the fermentation (Carbon dioxide). Well, perhaps it is, but we haven't used those yet. I think we should be, but the ones we had are old and cannot be cleaned. Nobody seems too bothered about it though, although I'd feel a lot happier if we would simply buy some new ones. The hole at the top of the white wine barrels was just covered over for a few weeks, and now the bung has been put in... but only loosely. The fruit flies do seem interested in the red juice I put into the plastic container - but not in the other wine in the barrels.

On the other hand, it can be that all this will produce a wine but not a terribly great one.

Well, let's see... this year is for learning and next year is when I would like to start experimenting.

2009 Vintage Expected to be Excellent

2009-10-15T18:13:00.000+02:00

Time for a bit of mutual backslapping. The most excellent Hungarian foodie site Chew.hu gave me a shout-out so I'm returning the favour.

Their article states that this year "Grape Production Down 10%" -- I have no idea -- and "2009 Vintage Expected to be Excellent" -- it bloody well better be! Nice to know my 600 litres or so will form about .0002% of the national harvest of 300 million litres.

I'm a bit worried about the wine I put into the plastic container though. At the weekend the fruit flies were buzzing around the top of it, but not around the barrels oddly enough.

Volume of wine from the grapes

2009-10-07T14:43:00.001+02:00

(Updated this post because my original arithmetic was wrong.)

The bath is approx 1.2m x .75m and the red grapes filled it to about .15m deep, maybe a little more. That's a volume of .135 cubic metres. That volume of liquid theoretically should result in 135 litres, or practically a bit less when the pulp is removed. And indeed the actual result was indeed something like 130 litres of juice!

The white grapes filled the bath to about .6m deep. That's a volume of .54 cubic metres, which is 540 litres. And the actual result was estimated around 500 litres.

The final quantity of wine will be a big less because the sediment will be removed in coming months by 'racking'.

Additive-free

2009-10-06T13:04:00.000+02:00

Unlike the Hungarian "Winemaker of the Year 2005" I don't think we will be adding glycerol!

Red grapes pressed

2009-10-05T15:30:00.001+02:00

After stewing in their own juices for a week the red grapes got pressed on Saturday.

The 'présház' was a pretty sight when I walked in - the 'muslicak' (fruit flies) had taken over, they were literally everywhere. This won't affect the wine but it didn't look too pleasant.

I had to do the pressing on my own, and that wasn't a big deal - I'd seen how to use the press and had been told everything else to do. My first task however was to fill the barrel with whatever juice had already come out of the grapes. Using a hosepipe running down from the bath this probably about half-filled the 105 litre barrel.

Next I assembled the press and threw in the grapes - they all fitted in so I had only one pressing to do.

As each bucket was filled it was poured using a funnel into the barrel.

All was fine until the barrel filled up and I moved onto the second barrel... and it leaked! So instead I put the juice into a large plastic container for the time being. The first barrel now being full to the brim, meant I had to siphon some of it off into the plastic container - it's necessary to leave a good gap at the top of the barrel for the fermentation which needs air and will significantly bubble up.

I tasted the juice that came off from the grapes and amazingly after just one week in the bath it already tasted much more of wine than grape juice. (Some of the juice we had taken home after the harvest had also started to ferment in the fridge but it tasted quite different - like a fizzy fruit juice.)

As well as tidying and washing everything, I collected the dried-out grapes in a couple of containers - they will be just thrown back onto the soil. It would be possible to compost it but they don't.

Adding sugar to the must

2009-09-30T16:40:00.000+02:00

In order to produce a good wine, the must needs to have an appropriate quantity of sugar; this gets converted to alcohol during the fermentation process. If the natural grape sugars are not enough, sugar needs to be added. (To explain more what this means, I plan a subsequent post about the Hydrometer!)

In the case of the white grapes, the sugar level was a little over 18 degrees, whereas the desirable level is in the region 20 to 21 degrees. With the red grapes (which apart from being a different variety of course, sat two weeks longer in the sun before picking), the sugar level was a little under 20 degrees which is good but should be a bit higher. So in both cases some sugar needs to be added.

A rough estimate of the quantity of white must was 500 litres. And about 150 litres of red.

The magic formula (so I'm told) is that 1kg of sugar will increase the sugar level of 100 litres by 0.7 degrees.

The white must should be raised around 2 degrees to bring it close to 21. So let's the desired increase is 2.1 degrees (3 times 0.7). And it's 500 litres (5 x 100 litres). So 15 kg (3 x 5) of sugar was added.

With the red, I was told 4kg of sugar should be added. So 150 litres will have it's sugar level raised by about 2.6 degrees, with an end result around 22 degrees. I was told this would make a semi-sweet red. Now my personal preference is for dry reds, but this year is for learning so I don't want to interfere until I know what I'm talking about!

The red grapes are in...

2009-09-28T13:30:00.002+02:00

At the weekend we picked the red grapes. Unlike the the white grapes, which can be pressed immediately, the red grapes need to sit for a week before pressing. If they were pressed immediately a Rosé wine would be the result. We will return during the coming weekend to do the pressing.

Last time around we had a Scottish family living in Siófok helping out; this time the immigrant workers came from Ireland and Spain: my brother Gary and his partner Marta.

Child labour again too:

The crushed grapes look lovely:

The sugar level came to almost 20 degrees which meant that only a little sugar needed to be added to the 'must' to bring it up to the desired 21 degrees level.

Compare the colour of the red grape juice with that of the white two weeks ago!

Learning from the lesson of the white grapes, we took away lots of red grape juice to drink (about 15 litres) - perhaps a little too much because we have a lot less red than white and probably not enough to fill a barrel!

Off to drink some more now before it starts fermenting. A few more pictures here.

Must (grape juice)

2009-09-18T09:13:00.001+02:00

The grape juice, "Must" in both Hungarian and English, is really really tasty! We should have bottled more of it, but didn't have enough plastic bottles. Anyway, one must drink it within a few days before it starts to ferment.

I saw it selling in a cafe on the Ráday utca this week for 200Ft (60 euro cents) per deciliter.

The juice in the above picture was taken directly from the bath when the grapes were crushed by the mill, so it is quite cloudy.

The picture below shows the same jug, later on, after the remaining juice had settled. You can see how much sediment it contains.

The juice that came from the pressed grapes is a bit clearer, but still contains a lot of sediment which will be 'racked off' from the barrels in due course.

Pressing the grapes

2009-09-17T09:07:00.000+02:00

After the grapes are picked they first go into the daráló (mill) which removes the stalks and squeezes them a bit.

The bath fills up with the yummy grapes...

Some of the juice runs out of the bath - either directly into the barrel ...

or into a bucket which is poured into the barrel...

Next the grapes are lifted from the bath into the press...

the top is put on the press...

the screw is turned ...

and the juice - called "must" in Hungarian - flows out into buckets, and it is poured into the barrels using a funnel.

Once no more juice can be obtained, the press is partially dismantled, the pulp is removed and dumped unceremoniously onto a tarpaulin on the ground.

After all the grapes have been taken from the bath and pressed, the collected pulp is scooped up and returned to the bath. It will sit there for about 3 days, after which it will be pressed again - a lot more juice comes out and this "second pressing" is better quality.

This is how the grapes look after the first pressing, they are far from being dried out:

The pressed juice turned out to have a sugar level of about 18 degrees. That's reasonably good but since the sugar level determines the alcohol level in the end, it will need sugar added to bring it up to 20-21 degrees. I'll write about this in a follow-up post.

Szüret (Harvest)

2009-09-16T18:27:00.001+02:00

We harvested the white grapes at the weekend. The red ones will be picked 2 weeks later.

We had lots of help. Child labour too!

Afterwards there was Gulyásleves (Gulash soup) for lunch, made by Györgyi's mother:

Comely maidens helped press the grapes the old fashioned way...

And everyone went home with some juice and some grapes:

The next post will describe the first steps in making the wine!

No animals were harmed in the making...

2009-09-04T09:03:00.001+02:00

Eh, unfortunately not true...

Part of a wild pig hide:

Vine types

2009-09-02T15:42:00.001+02:00

We have a number of different types of vine. I don't think anybody knows exactly what they all are. They just get mixed together when the wine is made.

This one is probably Cirfandli (Zierfandler) - not the same as Zinfandel!

This one is probably Kékoportó (Blauer Portugieser):

This one (what's left of it!) is called Kövérszőlő which means fat grape and is nicest for eating:

Old coins

2009-09-01T11:09:00.001+02:00

While cleaning out the house we found a bunch of old coins - mainly "filler" from the late 80s. There were 100 fillers to a forint. Occasionally utility bills still show fractions of a forint; I haven't seen it used anywhere else. Fillers were taken out of circulation in 1999; even 1 and 2 forint coins were withdrawn last year. The silver ones are made from aluminium and don't sound or feel like real coins!

The current exchange rate is about 270 forint to the Euro. It means a 10 filler coin, if still valid, would have a whopping value of 37/1000 Eurocent, or 37/100000 Euro.

We also found a coin dated 1881. In very poor condition, it appears to be a 1 krajczár coin (called "Kreuzer" in Austria). Originally there were 60 of these to a Forint (known as "Gulden" in Austria); by the time this coin was issued it had been decimalized.

All of these are worth buttons!

We also found some old baking ingredients with "use by" dates up to 10 years ago!

Wasps

2009-08-31T03:17:00.009+02:00

Wasps love graves. And they go only for the sweetest!

I believe the furry one in the picture is a honeybee.

(Bigger pictures with sharper quality here)

Fruit trees

2009-08-28T15:06:00.000+02:00

We get a lot of fruit from the garden during the summer. First to ripen are cherries, then various types of peaches, apples and plums. There are also some quince. And of course grapes, which I'll come back to later.

In Hungary there are two different names for cherries - cseresznye (sweet) and meggy (sour). We have one tree of each. The sweet are lovely for eating, the sour are edible but better for cooking. They ripen in early summer. The only problem is that the trees are very large and it's impossible to reach all of the cherries. On the other hand there are far too many to eat anyway!

All the fruit is ripening early this year. There's been a lot of sunshine but also a good bit of rain through June and July which probably helped. We've been eating grapes since mid-July which I believe is very early.

The only problem with so much fruit is that you have to find a use for it. We've pureed quite a lot into juice. Györgyi's mother makes a nice "hideg gyümölcsleves" - cold fruit soup . Much is given away to relatives. Some of it just rots...

Intro

2009-08-28T14:49:00.000+02:00

During the summer we acquired an orchard near our weekend house in Siófok. It had been in Györgyi's family, originally belonging to her father. The place had been on sale for some time but in this area which is officially designated as farming land, buyers are rare. At one time it was very popular for Hungarians to have a weekend house where they could grow their own fruit, but the current generation are not interested, and there is a lot of land up for sale at low prices.

Anyhow, since it had failed to sell we decided to buy it out; it didn't cost a lot. The land area is 1500sq.m. which contains 12 rows of grapevine, 42 fruit trees and a house with wine cellar. There are some pictures of the house and garden at http://kiliti.webs.com/ - a rough and ready web page we used during the summer to try to attract some (low)paying guests interested in a 'back to nature' experience. Over the winter we plan some renovations to upgrade the house. I'll post some pictures of the wine cellar soon.

This blog will follow our efforts to make our own wine! At the moment there is a man, Sándor, who does the work and he will help us make our first wine this year. Since Györgyi's father died a few years ago, nobody has made wine here - the vines were maintained but the grapes were sold on. This morning I made the first step by washing out the bath and equipment where the grapes are pressed - dirty work because it hadn't been used in some years.