How Do You Make Wine ?

Well, we make homemade wine using a wine press.

Burgenland has one of the most fertile wine areas. Just about everywhere you drive in this part of Austria you can spot the vines growing. The choice of wine is astounding and fabulous for the wine lovers. Even for non-drinkers the colourful picture that the vineyards present, is worth seeing. At the moment the whole area is cloaked in the soothing autumn colours...yellow, red and amber.

There are of course the small wine makers, who really just make wine for own consumption ( which can really be a saving, depending how much you love your wine ) !
Bob and I helped out with the wine pressing yesterday and it was such fun to make the wine the old fashioned way. Of course as we found out again yesterday, it is really not the place to use good or light clothing.

It is not as if we have a slinging fight with the grape-mash. No, somehow " accidentally " the grape mash just flicks up at you. So Bob is now the proud owner of an almost " Picasso-like " white shirt. The best laundry in the world would struggle to remove the red wine stains, so he must get used to his unique shirt !

We used a manual wine press to separate the pulp from the juice of the grapes. It has only been processing for a few weeks, but jeez-a-lou, the fumes most likely put us over the limit. Whoever invented this wine press, was a genius. Yet it still is a lot of work making wine.

Well, now the wine will sit in the vat for a time, and hopefully the wine from the year before is enough to last us until this one is ready !
For some reason, any manual repetitive work, helps me focus on my thoughts and almost feels therapeutic.

Before most of the work processes were modernized and mechanized, life must have been simpler. Yes, of course it involved much more hard and exhausting manual work, but could that have not been a good thing ? Think about this : One of the few times that we forget about our stresses and problems, is when we are too busy doing things manually.
What do you think ?

Biggi

Fun stuff...

Washing drums have lots of uses !

Now this is the best part.

One drop at a time.