Blueberries Anyone, How about some wine

So what have I been up to while jasmine is off being spoiled by her grandparents and vacationing in south america...working?! The other day I made 200 gallons of wine. It feels great to batch up a ton of wine and then walk away, eat dinner, and go to bed knowing that all of those yeasties are still working. To me it feels like having a million employees, its great. Maybe elves would be a better description because I do not have to pay them; in fact they make money for me.

So here is one of the wines that I made, blueberry. These happen to be blueberries from canada and we processed about 600 lbs which made 100 gals. of wine. This picture shows half of them in buckets being thawed, sugared and scalded.

Here is the motley crew that Bill employs to make his wine. Can you believe they let us around this stuff and without beard hair nets? It is a rough gig for sure. So the process is, after thawing and scalding, we move the berries into a crusher that is hand cranked. That is what rich is operating. Once they are crushed we scoop them out of the barrel and place them into the press which is what is in front of me.

The press is pretty cool. It is a bladder press which means that once you have it loaded with crushed berries you simple hook a garden hose up to the bottom and turn on the water. The water fills the bladder, which is the black you can see in the following pictures, and squeezes the berries against the walls forcing all of the juice out.


Here is me hard at work. As you can tell I think that I have a really tough job. It is a rough deal getting up at the crack of noon and getting my game face on to say, ok...lets taste some wine and then make some wine and then taste that wine too.