Grapefruit Wine Day 1: The Bumper Box of Grapefruit

With a trip to the intimidating wine lady under our belts, we felt equipped to have a crack at a new batch of wine, altering our method slightly to accommodate the new information in our brains. As a guide, we're now using a combination of both this and this book, after wise wine woman assured us that "First Steps in Winemaking" is the only book to read for winemaking advice.

We popped to Aldi to have a look at what cheap fruit we could get our hands on, and hit the jackpot: we left the shop with a crate of 34 grapefruit, as well as a couple of extra bits for additional flavour. The fruit we bought gave us 7.5 litres of fruit juice, which we doubled with bottled water to get 15 litres of fruity liquid.

The main difference in our method was the use of a hydrometer, which measures all sorts of things about your fruity mess. Most importantly at this part of the process, it told us how much sugar to add to our juice to get a decent alcohol percentage later on. By far the best bit about the hydrometer is that it's all colour coded, so there seems to be no need to know what the numbers mean. I certainly don't. Nevertheless, our must had a pre-sugar level of 1.015 on the hydrometer (just below the thick black band). To ensure that there's enough sugar in there to ferment properly, you need a measurement that's nearer the bottom of the blue band. Once we'd added 2.5kg of sugar that measurement was 1.09, which was perfect.
To reiterate, I have no idea what those numbers mean. Just go with it.

Once the sugar was added and it was all measured and good, we popped all the skins and flesh back in the tub to sit for a week in the hopes that they'll somehow add to the flavour. It might work.

What we now have in the cupboard under the stairs (along with the peaches - don't forget them) is:

34 grapefruits
2 mangoes
6 oranges
3 lemons
7.5l water
2.5kg sugar

all mushed up into 15 (absolutely delicious) litres of soon-to-be wine. Watch this space.


Sam and Jonee