Making Good Ol’ Fashioned Foot Wine

My cousin and her husband have been renting a beautiful A Frame house overlooking Keuka Lake while house hunting. This house overlooks quite a bit of vineyards and T had expressed an interest in making some homemade wine. I said it sounded good to me and once the grapes got ripe to let me know and we could go picking and we get get working on some homemade wine.

Well, the grapes were ready yesterday and there is no time like the present to get started so we took the kids down and started picking. All of the grapes that were available to us were Vitis labrusca meaning that they are not the classic or “noble” grapes like Merlot, Cabernet, Chardonnay, Riesling, etc. They were Concord, Catawba, and Niagara grapes, but they were what were available to us and they will still make a decent homemade wine if treated nicely.

We set the kids up with a bucket and T and I set about picking a mix of Catawba and Concords.

A Bird and M were good for about two buckets half filled then they decided it was much more fun to eat grapes as they chased each other though the vineyard rows.

After we had a couple of totes of reds, T an I filled three 6 gallon buckets full of Niagara grapes, and then we were off. By this time, it was getting late and the kids needed dinner so T and I made arrangements that he would take the reds and process them that night and I would take the whites and crush them and get them going. So T and M dropped A Bird and I off at home and were off and rolling to get home for some dinner.

A Bird and I woofed down a quick dinner and were out on the deck for some old fashioned grape stomping. Yep, we were using her little feet to crush them up.

Here we are as I am just lowering her in.

I think she likes it.

Then she started to get the hang of things. Two buckets at once !!!

L Bird was shocked as you can see, lol!

Then L Bird got into the act.

Finally all of the grapes were crushed and the girls left to hit the showers to rinse the sticky juice off their legs and seeds from their toes and left me with the job of straining the skins and pulp from the juice and transferring the juice to a carboy. IT TOOK FOREVER, well at least it felt like FOR-EV-ER. After it was all over, three buckets of grapes worked out to roughly 3.5 gallons, it doesn’t seem like much compared to the amount of grapes but it definitely is not a bad using your feet compared to a real basket press.

So now all of the juice is fermenting, both the reds and the whites. I’ll keep you updated on the progress of the foot wine, and I’m sure there will be some interesting tasting notes.

How did you spend your Sunday???