DIY Poor mans destemmer

[GreenEnvy22]

In the past I've mostly not bothered destemming the grapes I get, as it was too time consuming. I do have a crusher, those can be found pretty cheap on Craigslist/Kijiji type sites, but destemmers are usually a lot more.

This week I was looking for info on building a DIY one, and while I still want to build something automatic I can connect to my crusher, I found a cheap and easy solution I thought I'd share.

We have some mini greenhouse type units we use in the spring to get our seeds started for our veggie garden. They have green wire mesh shelves on them. I took 3 of these and zip tied them together, slightly offset eachother to get the gap between each wire smaller.

With that made, I placed it over one of my brutes, and put on a handful of grape clusters. moving them side to side with my hands, the grapes all fell into the bin, leaving the vast majority of the stems on top.

I had 3 lugs to go through, and it took me just under an hour. Next time it would probably go quicker. So if anyone is doing some smaller quantities of grapes and hand destemming, this might save you some time.


Here is the shelving setup. Just rolling/scraping the clusters back and forth on here worked quite well.




Destemming all done, about to crush.




Crushing all done.

 

[LoveTheWine]

Nice work. I use something similar, stretched fine chicken wire over an oak frame.

 

[BernardSmith]

I don't make wines from grapes and so have not had to think about destemming but interestingly - and coincidentally, on Wed Nov 1st , Eric Asimov in an article in the NY Times - Delicious and Beyond talks about how some wine makers in the Rhone Valley are choosing not to destem in order to enhance the "savory" flavors that are added to the grape together with greater tannin complexity the stems add to their wines. .

 

[vacuumpumpman]

I have used my crusher and a plastic milk crate to demstem when dong small batches - otherwise I will grab my friends crusher / desteamer

 

[Stressbaby]

This is similar to the elderberry/cookie rack trick.