Pressing Grapes to Make Rose' Wine

This is Jay Steger from Cold Country Vines and Wines. Today we're going to talk about pressing red grapes to make rosé. This is one method out of several you can use and we'll be getting into that right away. Okay, before we actually get into pressing the grapes, I'll just go over a few things. Cleanliness is always important even though, for those of you who've pressed grapes before, you know, pressing grapes is one of the messiest things you could possibly do, but you don't want to get spoilage bacterias in there. Make sure your containers that you put these juices in are clean and sterilized if you can. Make sure you have your process all figured out ahead of time because once you start, you're all full of grape, you know, and it's just a messy job. So you want to kind of have this all figured out ahead of time. This is why I make these videos so you can go, you can watch what I do and you can methodically adjust how you do your process based on what I do. I don't, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna say I don't do it perfect. I just was an amateur winemaker just like you guys years ago and I just took it one step further and opened up a winery. So I know a lot about making mistakes that amateurs make because I made them all or at least I made a lot of them. So with this all being said, let's start getting into the actual grape pressing. We're using a 20 pound grape press. I bought this press probably 20 years ago and this is a nice little press because it doesn't take up any space. It's easy to use and you can basically buy it for a couple hundred dollars and it, it works fine. It just works great. So, so you'll see it's, this is one of the oldest types of presses made. They started making these probably a thousand or more years ago. I'd say it was closer to 2,000 years ago. So yeah, so by the way, just in case you didn't know, wine making and grape growing are the oldest professions in the world. So definitely, we're definitely following a lot of buried experience, 8,000 years worth of wine making this planet has seen. So with that being said, let's get into pressing. Okay, now we are going to, we're going to de-stem some grape. We're going to take our nice clean tub here and our nice milk carton and we're going to take our grapes and we're going to de-stem them. Now, I could show you the de-stemmer we have here at the winery, but it wouldn't do you guys much good because you don't have one of those. So how this works is you take, this is a cluster of petite pearl grapes and you just basically, you don't have to worry about mashing them because you want to break them a little. So, so you, you just rub them on these holes and you see how that works. The grapes just fall through. It works so nice. And a friend of mine taught me this a while back. And I won't mention his name because I'm not sure he wants me to mention his name, but he taught me that. And this, when, when my wife and I were first making wine years and years ago, we did this all by picking grapes off of the stem by hand, which we did 200 pounds. Once it took us five hours and needless to say, you do it this way. It's not going to take you five hours, probably take you about 200 pounds. Still probably take you a couple of hours, but a couple of hours I can handle five hours. That was a lot of work. So you keep doing it like this until you're all done. And the, the actual goal here is to break the grape open. So you want, a lot of these are not going to be quite broken yet. So after, after you're done here, you're going to take, you're going to take a little masher and just gently crush each grape. You can do it by hand too. Depends on how much you have here, but you want these grapes to be, these are, it's actually a pretty tough grape, but you want these grapes to be squashed just a little bit. And that's what our crusher destemmer does. It just gently, it just barely breaks the skin open so that, so that this grape, when it's pressed, the juice will flow out. Believe it or not, this tiny grape, you put this in a press, you put a thousand of these in a press and squeeze it, and there'll be 10 or 15% of these will never even break. You won't get a drop of juice out of them. So, so that's why you break the skin of the grape first and then you press them. So we aren't going to go and belabor this whole point by doing 25 pounds of grapes for you, but I wanted to show you, I wanted to show you this because this is a very important part. You can, it is perfectly acceptable to press whole clusters. However, you're going to get some of those tannins from the clusters in the wine. And of course, if you like a delicate wine, you don't want that tannin in there. I personally, stem tannin is too bitter for me. It just makes the wine too bitter and I would just as soon not have it. Now, with that being said, if you're talking late harvest or ice wine, the stems are already mature and you don't get that tannin out of them. So you can do that, but yeah, you don't want those green stems, greener stems in with your, with your pressing because you will press some of that, some of that tannin out and it's a very astringent tannin. So let's move on to pressing. Let's get this press out here and we will, we will show you what to do once you've got these all destemmed. So we're going to put our grapes, our crushed grapes right in here. And of course the juice is going to come out these slots and it's going to flow out here and we're going to have our pail down there catching the juice. And so we're going to put our grapes in here. The first off, when you dump the, the, the must in here, it's automatically going to start leaking juice out of here. So the juice comes out of these little slots and it comes right out of this spout and it dumps right into a, into a five-gallon pail. So now with that being said, I want to point out real quick here that this first juice that comes out is called Free Run. If you want to make the best, the absolute best wine, you want to do it with Free Run. Free Run is your highest quality juice. So now once we start pressing it, we start getting some bitter tannins and some impurities. You get a lot more, I believe there's a lot more tartrate inside the, toward the seeds. So you're going to get a lot more bitter wine, but 99.9% of all wine made is made with pressed grapes. So you probably, if you've tasted a Free Run wine, it's not very often. So I've never actually, oh, I did one. I did a Free Run wine once only because I got some contamination on the top. Not, not really contamination. It was, it was some spoilage bacteria. And so I just Free Ran off all the juice out the bottom and used it, used it actually, it was to make this very wine we're making today. So that's how I started making Petit Pro Rosé was, it was a problem with a few years ago, the grapes were so cold that we had to heat them up. Well, my heating element only heated up the top of the grapes, which caused them to start spoiling. Whereas the bottom of the grapes were still cold and they were fine. So anyway, that's a very weird story. So I'm going to go get some grapes and we're going to start filling this up. All right, we now have our full pail of, of our de-stemmed crushed grapes. And these are Petit Pearl. And as I said before, these we can direct press and dump right into the, the press because, because they have enough color in them already. As a matter of fact, Petit Pearl has almost too much color for a rosé. Petit Pearl makes a wonderful rosé, which many wineries are finding out now, including us. I actually like the rosé better than the red. It is the only rosé we have that I'll drink. I'm getting up here cause this is a little bit heavy. And you notice I changed my shirt. I wear a purple shirt when I'm working with red grapes, because no matter what you do, you're always going to get some on you and, and it never comes out of light color. All right, so I'm putting, putting our grapes into the press and it's not easy to get them all perfectly in there. Okay, there we go. I will stop right there and maybe not. I'll, I'll put a few more in. We're getting our nice free run right now, which is beautiful. And as you can see, there's a lot of nice color there. I did spill a little bit over here, but that's not going to hurt much because we're going to, we're going to settle it out a little bit anyway. We're probably going to rack it in the morning and then inoculate it after that. So look at that. That is gorgeous. So now we'll just let that keep doing its thing. These two little pieces of wood go right around your, okay, we're going to get this out of the way a little bit. These go right around your shaft and then we have our blocks of wood here, which put your blocks of wood just like that. And then just like that. And you got two more blocks of wood, just in case you really want to press harder. You have the ability to come back out and then repress it a little more. So now we will roll this down so that it makes contact with the wood. And there's a couple of different designs of these presses. So this ain't the only one. We are going to bring this down right to the edge. We have our little two clips in here, which actually enable the ratcheting mechanism. Here's the handle, which goes in here. Okay. Now you probably would notice anyway, but I did put some, some drywall screws in the bottom here. So this thing, so this thing doesn't try to twist on me when I'm, when I'm ratcheting. Okay. All right. So we're making some progress here. Slowly this thing compresses the grapes. Now you can see why you need them two extra boards, because I'm going to run out of room here pretty quick. See, and now you can see the, the juices starting to increase. And all this does is it, it just slowly screws this whole thing down so that, so that our two boards there put pressure on top of the, on top of the cake, they call it. The cake is the, is just the, the mass of grapes in there. And it's, by the time you're done, it's just skins and seeds, but yeah, you, you end up putting, they, they, for some reason in the grape industry, they say, they say they go by atmospheres, which two atmospheres would be 30 pounds. And they always say for, for white grapes, you only go about an atmosphere and a half. And for red grapes, you can go almost up to two atmospheres, which basically means about 25, 25 to 28 pounds. So as you notice, we're getting a pretty good stream out of there right now. We got about, oh, I'd say two, two and a half gallons out of there, out of this 20 pounds. So yeah, when you're, when you're doing a five gallon batch, you're going to do two presses, probably, which five gallons, that would make sense because five gallons is 40, 40 pounds, five gallons of water is 40 pounds, and this is a 25 pound press. So the math works. And to tell you the truth, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to remember how to use this. Back in the old days, I use this all the time, but it's been about 10 years, but it still works just like he used to. There's still a juice coming out real good. Now, see, as you can see, I'm starting to touch the side here. So now what we'll do is back this out, put the other two boards in, and we'll be able to press it that much more. This is, this is about all you really need. And if you notice this juice looks really, really red, you'd almost say, well, that's going to be a red wine. But by the time you're done settling everything, it really is a rosé, which, which really works out nice. It's, this, this is one of the, one of the, like I said, this is one of the better rosés I've ever tasted. And it, it grows in Wisconsin, which is really cool. We have three, we have 2.9 acres of this actually, which is quite a bit for one variety in Wisconsin. We usually sell about half of them. So now when you're done, you can, you can basically tilt this a little bit to try to get the rest, the final bit of the juice out. And you'll see there'll be grapes laying in the trough. You don't really want to scrape them into your, into your pail because they would add more color. That's really the biggest disadvantage. It would add more color to your wine. And right now, this being a rosé, we don't want more color. We want it to be, being this is so dark to begin with, we want to lighten it up as much as possible. So we take this apart, take the handle off, and we can just spin this back off. And the thing is, too, is I made this pretty simplistic. What I would be doing if I was doing white grapes, which is normally what you direct press, red grapes you're, you're pressing after you fermented. So with white grapes and these, I would be taking this off, I'd be taking all of this out, and then I'd put gloves on, of course, because there's a lot of acid in grapes and sometimes it, it can affect your skin. So, so you put gloves on, you take this whole thing off. Basically, you lift these all out of here. Yeah, let's see, you got some, got some grape skins hanging on there. But you, you just dig in there and mix it all up a little bit. You just mix it around and then you put it all back together and press again and you'll get about, you'll get a of wine out of it. And now if you're, if you're buying really expensive grapes, you're going to want to get every drop you can out of it. Unless if you're, if you're doing real fancy reds from, from out west or from France or Italy, now what you're going to do, and this is really important, what you're going to do is you're going to taste, you're going to press, and then you're going to taste the, the actual juice coming out of it. And as you press harder and harder and harder, this juice is going to get more bitter and bitter and bitter because it's going to have more and more tannins. And at some point you cut it off saying, okay, there's enough, I want my quality to be better than this minimum quality, so I'm going to stop here. A lot of people don't do that, but it all depends on what your goals are. If your goals are to make an alcoholic beverage that you can serve that you're not worried about quality, get as much out of it as you can. If you're worried extreme about quality, then just go with the free run. But on the other hand, if you're like most of us and you, you want a good quality and you want good volume too, you'll press to a certain extent and then you'll stop when the, when you taste this and it gets, it's getting to the point where you know it's bitter enough. And that's the part that takes a little bit of experience because the first time you do it, you probably will, you probably stop too early. Whereas when you get more experienced, you realize you can press a lot harder and get a lot more out and the wine is still excellent. So, so that's something I learned by doing it a lot. And now comes the fun part and that is, we'll take that and go like that. We'll take that and go like that. We'll just take these out of there. Take that like that and this like this and there is your cake. You wonder why they call it a cake, huh? It looks a little bit like a cake. So the cake, actually you can use it for fertilizer, but don't use it for fertilizer in your vineyard. If you have disease in your, in your, in your vineyard this year, this stuff putting it back in your vineyard will, will bring that disease right back in. It just adds that much more because a lot of these mildews will overwinter and they will cause disease again next spring. So, so you kind of want to be careful with that, but for other, for other crops it's excellent fertilizer. And see now we're going to take this all in the back and wash it up and we're going to get, we're going to get rid of that and we are pretty much done. If you can see here, we, I didn't press this anywhere near as much as I should have or could have, but we have, there's a calibration on here, I think we have two and a half gallons. So two presses would be five, two presses would be almost exactly your five gallons, which would be really cool. The best way to press though that I found is to do two three gallon jugs because you need that airspace when you're fermenting. Otherwise you have a very good chance of foaming over and then wasting half your wine. But if you use two three gallon jugs and fill them up to two, the two and a half gallon mark or just a little bit more, then when you're done fermenting, you dump them into a five gallon carboy and you know, and then you're up on the top of the neck so that you don't get that oxidation. It's the perfect way to do it, I think. So with that being said, we're going to stop now. As you know, I own a winery and this was harvest season, so it was really hard to squeeze this video in, but I really love doing these videos and I love getting back to you guys and just showing you a little bit more about winemaking and giving you a little bit of the stuff I've learned through the years. So if you like these videos, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification button and you'll get notified every time I put a new video out. So this is going to be an excellent wine. I hope your wines are great too. You could cold settle it for a day or two and get the sludge out of the bottom, but this pressed pretty clean. So you can really tell if you start seeing a lot of chunks and stuff go in. Whereas white grapes, because you don't want any skin tannin in there at all, that's the main reason you cold settle a white grape is because those skin tannins don't do a white grape justice. It clouds the fruity flavors that you're trying to get. Anyway, I enjoyed working with this home winemaking equipment one more time and I enjoy doing these videos. Let me know what you think. Let me know what you want to see next. I've got one person asked me to do a video on stuck fermentation. I promise that one is coming up soon. I will see you next time and happy winemaking.