Pleasures of Growing Your Own

One of the pleasures of growing your own grapes and making your own wine is having good friends join you to enjoy it. A weekend or so ago, Jim Martin, his wife Celia, daughter Camile (attorney), son Devonte (not shown) and friends Festus (sp?) (medical doctor) and his wife Rita from Giuana all dropped by to pick a few grapes. It was a fine day and we enjoyed their company. Fine folks all.

Photo Interlude

Makin' Muscadine Wine

After the grapes were picked, I hauled them in 5-gallon plastic buckets to the cook shack for processing.

Our set up at the cook shack consists of a crusher, a bladder press and a concrete floor that drains easily and consequently can be cleaned easily


We then ready the crushed grapes for pressing. Some have been kept covered and cooled for several days to allow the color and taste from the must to get into the juice.

The must is then loaded into the press with an old pot (sterilized) in which my mother cooked string beans probably forty years ago. The crushed grapes might not look very enticing to some, but to me and other amateur wine makers it's beautiful. If it looks bad, just remember how good sausage tastes.

When the bladder is inflated, the juice is at last released from its confinement in the pulp and peel of the grape. For neophytes like me, it's a telling moment of truth and excitement. After months of pampering and nurturing the growing plants and fruit, the gold is released from the soil and now can be made ready for the next step that will make it all worth while ... or not.


Capture every last drop now and take it to Pam's fermentation room in the new barn where ordinary grape juice will become muscadine wine.

Harvest Time

The past week, we've been processing more grapes for wine. Here are some pictures.
















Richard Blount helped us build the new barn we'll use to ferment the wine once we get it organized. We're almost there. Here he's helping pick Nobles, small red grapes we'll use to make red wine.














Nobles are small but prolific. Folks seem to like them more than others for winemaking. The owner of the Dakota Winery in Chiefland, Florida, told me he grows what the public wants and Nobles are what he grows most.















These are called Triumph. I don't know where such names come from. I guess the folks who develop them get to name them. Some names are pretty hokey. A farm in Georgia calls a large green grape they developed "Granny Val" after the guy's grandmother. .... cute.















Aren't these beautiful? They're called Supreme. It's a patented variety from that same Georgia Farm. These vines are barely a year old so I'm expecting a lot more next year and even more the next. I was surprised and certainly pleased with what they produced the first year.




This is the "cookshack." It was originally a decaying, garage sort of structure when I bought the place. I rebuilt it from the roof down with pressure-treated 2X6's taken from the large barn in the background. The lumber was being used for horse stalls. Since we don't have horses ... well, those 2X6's just needed to be doing something else.

The cookshack is where we do the crushing and pressing ... and BBQ-ing ... and rib smoking ... and fish frying.

Making magical muscadine elixer

To date we've made 40 gallons of juice! Don't know if we should have more, based upon the age and number of producing vines we have, but we feel pretty good about it. Most of it is from the Noble, a muscadine variety and a small black grape that grows easily here, and prolifically.






Some of Pam's friends from HCC dropped by this past weekend and helped us do the picking. Phyllis and her husband, Mal and his wife and another lady. Nice folks. We fed them "cuban" sandwhiches made by a Greek restaurant that specializes in Italian food. Go figure.

Some of the younger vines producing for the first time this year provided enough fruit for us to see what kind of grape we'll be getting from them. I like the ones that are really sweet and grapy tasting, as opposed to those that are juicy but lack that certain richness that I believe is what growing the damn things is all about. Over time, we'll make the decision to focus on the variety we like most, be it a wine grape or a fruit grape.


We now have about 330 vines at various stages of maturity. 40 gallons should produce over 150 bottles of wine if all goes well. Since we're still so early in the learning process, however, some of it will likely not be worth keeping.