Towards the end of September 2013 I’d been gently encouraged to make wine with a friend’s grapes.  I looked in to it and felt it was far too hard what with all the tools and additives you needed.  Egged on by some home brew relations I plunged in to making something resembling wine with English grapes.  I bought a hydrometer, pectolase, and a fermentation bucket from May and Brett  and we filled it with grapes.  I washed them and squashed them and ended up with a pitiful 4.5 litres of juice.  Squashing them was a trial.  I gave them a good fisting in the end.

The recipe said leave it for 24 hours and at the end we had something remarkably like grape juice.  I sweetened it up to exactly 1080 using bog standard household sugar but measured it carefully using the instructions on the hydrometer.  Once I got the calculation right I was fine!

I whacked in the yeast and waited for action.  This was frustrating because whilst it was clearly fermenting there was no bubbler action at all.  (I later worked out that the bucket was not sealing at all.  There was a blemish in the seal that I scraped off with a knife).

In the end, I took advice from my father-in-law and we decanted it in to a demijohn.  It bubbled away until the next stage – which will be clarifying somehow.