Ever since I was a kid, I can remember my dad with his piles of old dusty green bottles in our basement, just waiting to be filled with some of his homemade wine. Late summer evenings walking down the creaky wooden stairs, I’d be stricken with the pungent scent of fermenting berries or other fruit. The huge 5-gallon glass jars filled with must, slowly bubbled gasses through the strange plastic water-filled traps making an eerie bubbling sound.
I remember when I was in high school, I grinned to myself when my junior year teacher gave us the assignment of making home-made wine. I had the assignment in the bag, and was quite confident in turning in my full 750ml bottle of plum wine. To this day, I still wonder what my teacher ever did with all those bottles of wine, and along those same lines, I wondered how many kids simply filled a generic bottle with something bought in a store.
While out here in Ohio, it was grape picking time at a local orchard, and my dad decided to invite me along for the process.
Between myself and my parents, we ended up picking 11 pecks of grapes. Here’s me with just a portion of our booty:
Next, it was time to de-stem the grapes. Like the picking of the grapes, it wasn’t a quick process, but rather a rather steady even-paced meditative one .
The final process that I helped my dad with, was mashing the grapes into must. Seeing all those grapes, de-stemmed and sitting in a huge bucket, I was so temped to pull a Lucille Ball.
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