The science bit...

Of course there was much hysteria at my attempts to actually have a look at the chemistry going on, not least of all when I tried to bring both acid crystals and sodium hydroxide solution through Manchester airport security - this is another story, for another day... suffice to say that they ignored the sodium hydroxide, and had a real go with the acid, claiming it was a too high in volume solution - until I rattled it and suggested it was solid. Fortunately they were an amiable lot and joined in with the whole Les Anglais making wine in France Joie de Vivre.


So morning came and a small chemistry lab was set up in the kitchen. Do you remember titrations? Mmmm thanks to google and the dredging of our memories, the test tube was filled, the indicator added... nothing changed, no end point... so to cut a long story short, and some more google research later we discovered that the grape juice was too acidic, at 0.95% when ideal is 0.6%. What!?! All my plans had been laid to bring the acidity up from too low. Quickly looking up what to do with too much acidity, we rapidly came to the conclusion that it was in the "too hard" box for this year, and that we might be able to do a bit of correction later.

The most important measurement for us "Noddy" winemakers is specific gravity - this tells us all about sugar content, and eventual alcohol content and is a relatively easy measurement to take. It goes something like this...measure the specific gravity of the juice, look up on the table the amount of sugar needed (which when converted to alcohol by the yeast (being put in later tonight)) to get to the percentage of alcohol you want.

So in our case - juice was specific gravity 1.080, therefore 200g/litre sugar. The table said for 12.7% alcohol you need 220g/litre of sugar, and as we had 50 litres, we needed to add......yes 1kg of sugar, just a bag!

I ruined the first bag by dissolving it in water and realising I didn't want to add all that extra water, so then I got a jug of grape juice and dissolved it in that. Then in it went.

Next the wine making party begins when we add the yeast!!!