Archive | Wine making

Monday…

I just love the weather we have been having here in South Africa, the hottest days and then a generous down pour in the late afternoon… Our garden is looking quite lush and green especially after our cold dry winter…
This is where our seven precious girls (laying hens) live, a while ago we built them a wooden house to live in with laying boxes and perches, they love it, I will blog more about them later in the week…
Richard and Kye high up in our White Stinkwood Tree…
After many months of waiting for our grapes to mature in their wine vats, our wine is finally ready and we have bottled it. It is such a lovely tradition, every year when our grapes on our vine are juicy and ready, our family gets together and we harvest and make our own wine. You can see here for this years harvest. Our children as well as ourselves have learned so much from this experience. This year we added a dry yeast to develop a dry wine…
We are in full swing as far as our One Small Change is going. Yestarday we bought more lamps as we found we didn’t quite have enough, they are really inexpensive and give us so much wonderful glowing light. Erin was helping me to fill them with citronella oil and replace some of the wicks. All lights were out last night, not even our outside lights were on, it felt really magical and cozy. We all sat in the lounge together after we had eaten our lamp and candle lit dinner and I read a story to everyone before bed…
I have been working on Terrance Toucan…
By the way, have you ever tried knitting by lamp light, it is really a wonderful and calming experience I think we will continue to use our lamps long after this month is over…
May you all have a wonderful week…
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Winemaking 2009….

Everyone starting to pick the heavily laden grape vine…

Here are all the harvesters….

Kye treading the grapes and everyone else is waiting eagerly for a turn…

All the crushed grape skins, stalks and juice are placed in a barrel for a few days, then we will sieve it and remove all the pulp. It will then be poured into a barrel to ferment for a few months and then we will have wonderful wine….

Jenna is learning about the Ancient Greeks at the moment, so this ties in nicely with that….(how wine was processed in Ancient Greece).

Even a Grey Lourie came to watch us from the tree tops…

And Richard did his 2nd race on Saturday, well done Richiroo….

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Our Wine is Finally Ready!

Here is our finished product!

When I started my blog in March this year we were busy harvesting grapes to make wine. Today we finally bottled and corked our wine, we also made labels for it and our children have been involved throughout the process, learning about fermentation etc.. It has been a great learning experience for everyone in our family. We have decided to make wine again next March and it will be a family tradition that we will all look forward to each year.

Here are some more photos of the decantering and corking process.


This is the corking device, we had to soak our corks in boiling water to soften them for a few minutes, then a thin piece of gut is inserted into the bottle neck before the cork goes into the bottle, the cork is then pushed into the bottle and once it is in, the gut is pulled out and this allows for trapped air to be released.

Today we bottled twenty bottles of wine and we still have enough wine for about twenty more, it tastes really great and we are quite impressed with it. It will have to stand upright for a few days and then we will lie it on its side so that the corks will not dry out and they will constantly be in contact with the wine which is important. We even made our own labels.

Have a great week ahead…..

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We all took turns walking the grapes, even our two year old decided to have a go!

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