That sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to get your fermentation started.
Right basket press size
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balatonwine
The Verecund Vigneron
I have to agree with @winemaker81 here.
One does not need a 100 L press to press 100 L of must. Because basket presses are designed to be reloaded. That is you fill them up, press, remove the press tree and press plates, add more must and press again. One can easily process twice, or more, the press side volume to must volume this way.
To help make removing your press plates, if they do not have little finger holes in them, consider adding them. Kind of like being able to pick up a bowling ball.
One does not need a 100 L press to press 100 L of must. Because basket presses are designed to be reloaded. That is you fill them up, press, remove the press tree and press plates, add more must and press again. One can easily process twice, or more, the press side volume to must volume this way.
To help make removing your press plates, if they do not have little finger holes in them, consider adding them. Kind of like being able to pick up a bowling ball.
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balatonwine
The Verecund Vigneron
Confused by this comment.
I never de-stem my white grapes, and press in my basket press.
Works fine.
Online resources are often not really for small wine makers, but for commercial wine makers. For one thing, I do a light press. So the chances of any bad effects from stems is almost zero. Larger wine makers do a hard press in commercial hydraulic presses where the pressure is of tons of force, which can certainly cause problems if stems are present.
That is, the online world is often today less and less about small producers and more about large commercial interests (or small producers who parrot what they read online and remain ignorant of possibilities).
All IMHO of course. Hope this helps.
balatonwine
The Verecund Vigneron
I'm curious as to what sort of yield you get from pressing whole clusters in a basket press? I recently pressed out my first batch of white juice using crushed/destemmed grapes and got around 100 US gal/ton (~415L per metric tonne).
balatonwine
The Verecund Vigneron
I crush my grapes. Not whole cluster pressing.
But I do track volumes so I can answer this question. Sort of. Because different grapes have tighter clusters than others so the first volume measurement** --- harvested grapes in a bin --- is rather variable. That being said, basic rough numbers:
Crushing of my grapes into must reduces the volume of harvested grapes to about 45% of the un-crushed grapes.
Wine after pressing is about 28% of the un-crushed grape volume, and about 60% of the must volume. Which makes sense as most of the crushed grapes are liquid not solid, so most should come out into liquid.
This is for white wine not de-stemmed. De-stemmed grapes will reduce the must volume after crushing quite a lot, but should give about the same total volume of juice after crushing. And if one ferments on the skins, one will get even more wine as the skins break down and give up more juice.
So if one takes 1 metric ton is 1000 KG and one assumes the wine is 1 KG per liter, than doing the math.... assuming an equal volume to weight ratio (which is only an assumption*), and using actual liquid volumes and weights are "given" than 28% of 60% of the original volume is about 46%.. Your results were about 41%. Which is just fine.
And if you look online, you will see that most pressed wine weights come in at about 35%-45% of the grape weight. So you are fine.
Hope this helps.
* Often in science one may have to consider, for purposes of the thought experiment, an Elephant of negligible mass....
** I deal with metric tons of grapes, self harvested, But I do not weigh them ... which would be better, but I do not have a 1000 KG scale....
But I have taken samples of grapes 20 L and weighed them, and I have a sort of base line, and the results are similar... as in close enough in the horse shoes and hand grenades scale. Which is fine for me.
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In fact, as I was mentioned in the beginning of the thread, I work contract here (construction) second year and decide to try myself. And first white will kind of orange, because it crushed with stems and getting fermented with skins and stems (5th day already). But I would be happy to learn how to get refreshing young white wine. How to do it in home making wine, here, I don't know yet. First, here in Georgia, one needs to have a lot personal contacts, a lot spare time drive around, to get grapes with right acidity and sugar. This season is my first try and I was to busy working and almost missed grape harvest.@zappoid - Being from the Georgian Republic .... do look into making "karvisperi ghvino" wine.
I have an experiment going -- instead of making a second run from the pomace of my two large batches, I added a 23 liter Merlot kit to each. We pressed today and the results look promising.
When pressing, we put the pomace from 8 lugs (288 lbs, 131 kg) into my #40 press -- it fit:
After pressing the heck out of it, the remainder is small:
When pressing, we put the pomace from 8 lugs (288 lbs, 131 kg) into my #40 press -- it fit:
After pressing the heck out of it, the remainder is small:
Sorry, did not understand. What means "pomace from 8 lugs"?
Did you press right on the truck bed?
Grapes are commonly sold in the USA in 36 lb (16.3 kg) lugs (boxes). I made 2 batches of wine, each using 8 lugs (288 lbs / 130.6 kg). Pomace is the grape pulp after fermentation.
Wine kits are sold with dried skin packs, which are added to the wine to add body, aroma, and flavor. I reconstituted two kits, and instead of using skin packs, I added the pomace from each batch to a kit. The grapes I used are Grenache and Tempranillo, and the two kits are Merlot, so I produced Merlot/Grenache and Merlot/Tempranillo batches.
We pressed the batches yesterday. The first picture (above) shows the entire batch of Merlot/Grenache in the press, which illustrates how much the press can hold. I suspect that if filled the brim, the press will probably hold 140 kg.
The old stand I built for my press broke. I have the wood to create another one, but lacked time to complete it prior to pressing, so I put the press on the tailgate of my truck.
