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This is a step-by-step recipe for a dry white table wine. A pre-requisite to applying this recipe is to learn the basics of winemaking.

White wines are always pressed before fermentation, so only the grape juice winds up in the fermenting pail.

Ingredients

* 18 lbs. ripe white grapes

* 1 campden tablet

* Tartaric acid, if necessary

* Table sugar, if necessary

* 1 packet wine yeast (like Champagne or Montrachet)

Making process

1. Harvest grapes once they have reached 19 to 22 percent
sugar (19° to 22° Brix). Pick over grapes, removing any moldy clusters, insects, leaves or stems.

2. Place the grape clusters into the nylon straining bag and put into the bottom of the food-grade plastic pail. Using very clean hands or a sanitized tool like a potato masher, firmly crush up the grapes inside the nylon bag.

3. Crush the campden tablet (or measure out one teaspoon of sulfite crystals) and sprinkle over the crushed fruit in the bag. Cover pail and bag with cheesecloth and let sit for one hour.

4. Lift the nylon straining bag out of the pail. Wring the bag to extract
as much juice as possible. You should have about one gallon of juice
in the pail.

5. Measure the temperature of the juice. It should be between 55° to 65° F. Adjust temperature as necessary. Take a sample of the juice in the pail and use your titration kit to measure the acid level. If it is not between 6.5 and 7.5 grams per liter, then adjust with tartaric acid as described above.

6. Check the degrees Brix or specific gravity of the juice. If it isn’t around 22° Brix (1.0982 SG) adjust accordingly.

7. Dissolve the packet of yeast in 1 pint warm (80° to 90° F) water and let stand until bubbly (no more than 10 minutes). When it’s bubbling, pour yeast solution directly into the juice. Cover pail with cheesecloth, set in a cool (55° to 65° F) area and check that fermentation has begun in at least 24 hours. Monitor fermentation progression
and temperature at least once daily.

8. Once the must has reached dryness (at least 0.5 degrees Brix or 0.998 SG), rack the wine off the sediment into a sanitized one-gallon jug, topping up with dry white wine of a similar style. Fit with a sanitized bung and fermentation lock. Keep the container topped with white wine. Be sure the fermentation lock always has sulfite solution in it. After
10 days, rack the wine into another sanitized one-gallon jug. Top up with wine again.

9. After three months, siphon the clarified wine off the sediment and into clean, sanitized bottles and cork them.

10. Store bottles in cool, dark place and wait at least three months before drinking.

The harvest comes when the fruit is ripe. This occurs at the end of summer for grapes. So the harvest is not currently under way in places where spring is arriving. Such places include South Africa and Australia.

Vitis vinifera is currently harvested in the Northern hemisphere. You have other options for obtaining wine grapes. I’ll talk about them in the upcoming guide to making your own wine starting in a week.

Harvesting is very hard work and is labor intensive.

The Northern hemisphere shows grape harvest about two or three weeks earlier than usual. In Western Europe this is not because the summer was sunny and dry like in 2003. It was not. “In 2007, the whole season was early, right from the budding, because of the mild winter and spring” said Luca Vietti, winemaker at the Vietti winery, in the Piedmont (as reported by the Wine Spectator).

Harvest in the first half of August only concerns some white grapes. The regions where vintners began harvesting in the first half of August are:

• In the USA: the Napa Valley in California;
• In France: Alsace and Roussillon;
• In Italy: Lazio, Veneto and Trentino.

Other websites show recent reports on the current harvest: in California, in Texas, in North Carolina, in New York, in France (there and there), in Italy, in Germany. The present post is the first in a series on the grape harvest. The series will end with a snap view of the 2007 vintage. Your feed reader will be automatically updated of the posting if you subscribe.

Don’t believe mentions of a good vintage yet: it’s too early to address this fuzzy concept: wait until the wine is made! Still we already know that it will be very difficult for even expert winemakers to make good wine in the following parts: Texas, Bordeaux, Puglia and Sicily.

Later articles on the vintage are here:

• Oregon, Burgundy and Bordeaux vignerons explain harvesting and winemaking;
• The 2007 vintage would be bad in Europe.