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Using a fruit wines making press is a fantastic way to get in touch with your sensibility as a wine maker and include your own grapes and other products in the overall composition process of your wine. You can integrate grape types and try out new flavours with your wine making press, crushing your own grapes with a modern touch instead of stepping into a barrel and sloshing around with grapes all over your feet. While the old way of sloshing grapes can be fun and exciting, it is also not really practical for making wine at home or in the backyard.

The old-fashioned wine making press used to be a barrel in a yard that contained several grapes. People from the village or nearby counties would take off their shoes and stomp around on the grapes as a part of a great cathartic festival to ensure that each grape was squashed. The wine making process would then begin out of that type of celebration and great wines came out of it thanks to the feet of many being involved in it. From there, great wines were made in all the land and people became a key part of the wine making process, where they remain to this day.

The New World

Now, we no longer have such festivals in our fast-paced North American lifestyles. We use professional citrus wine making press equipment to extract the juice from the grapes and make the wine. This is somewhat quicker but it negates the process of putting an entire village into a bottle of wine and actually making a great impression on the bottle. Now, modern technology has given cathartic wine making a backseat and is improving on the process with greater sanitary significant and greater cost effectiveness. If we had to pay people to step on grapes to make wine, it would never work.

With a wine making press, you can now crush your own grapes to an incredible degree and start creating your own wine without employing your entire family to crushing grapes in the kiddie pool. The age and era of great wine can, in fact, begin with one small purchase of a grape wine making press and can continue through the era and into wonderful wine creation in your very own facility or home. You can then begin to plan out how the rest of your wine domination will begin and how you will overtake the world with one grape at a time.

Alright … so the cherries are clean and have been stoned/pitted therefore it is now time to press the fruit so that we can separate the juice from the pulp.

Now, I can tell you that for my first few batches of fruit wine I wanted to go a bit on the “cheap” so I used a potato masher to press the fruit. While this certainly works I can tell you that it really sucks doing it as you have to put a lot of muscle into it and you are left thinking that there must be a better way of doing this … and there is!

For our batch of cherry wine I decided to rent a ratchet grape/fruit press from one of our local wine making shops and it cost us $10 a day.

You might be able to find something similar on eBay or at a garage sale for under $100 but if you’re planning on buying a new press expect to spend over $250. Here’s a website I found that carries this model and several others www.homebrewit.com/aisle/1150.

Note that the press is a heavy bugger so we decided to press our grapes outside. This also made it easy for us to hose it down before and after we used it.

Here are the steps we followed to press our cherries:

Step 1 - Put the cherries in the press & place a clean bowl by the spout

Step 2 - Add the pressing blocks

Step 3 - Add the ratchet arm and press away until no more juice comes out

Step 4 - Transfer your juice to a clean stainless steel pot

Step 5 - Transfer cherry pulp to a straining bag (tie a knot at the top)

Step 6 - Bring your cherry juice to a boil but remove immediately from heat. This will help kill any bacteria or bugs that might be in the press.

Et voila! You now have the main ingredient for your cherry wine!

You will of course want to rinse your fruit press at this point and return it to your local wine supply store (if you rented it).

Fruit Pressing Tips:

1. Rent The Right Tools: Using a fruit press made this part of the process so much easier. If you are going to be a casual wine maker and have access to a grape/fruit press at your local wine supply store then rent it - don’t buy it (unless you have a hole burning in your pocket). The store we rented it from also wasn’t in a hurry to get it back so gave us a few extra days before we had to return it.
2. Have Help: I was happy to have my wife Michelle help me with this as there was a lot going on here, whether it be taking turns ratcheting the press, having someone ready to dump the juice if the bowl got too full to helping move the equipment around (note that the press was very heavy). She also seemed to be happy to get her hands in there and fill the straining bag with the cherry pulp.
3. Keeping Your Juice Clean: Your fruit press will undoubtedly be something that sits in the corner gathering dust between uses. This part of the process won’t exactly be clean so all you have to do is hose the press down before you use it knowing that your juice will most likely have some bugs in it. This is why we heated the juice to a boil then immediately took it off the heat. We didn’t want to burn the juice or reduce the amount of liquid in it - just enough heat to kill as much of bugs in it that should be in there. Adding a Camden tablet in our next step will also help kill any bacteria or bugs as well.

Up Next:

Stay tuned as next week we look at the recipe itself. Time to get fermenting and turning the juice into wine!

Enjoy and if you haven’t already please join in the discussion by becoming a member of our Cherry Wine Project community by going to http://thecherrywineproject.ning.com/

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”

P.S. I recently met a fellow Canadian by the name of Dominic Rivard who has been in the wine industry for over 15 years. His main passion is fruit wine and is in fact a founding director of the Fruit Wines of Canada Association.

He has written an excellent fruit wine book called “The Ultimate Fruit Wine Guide” that you might consider having a look at.

He has also recently joined The Cherry Wine Project Community and I’m sure would love to hear from you!