How to Make HOMEMADE WINE Like Farmers in Italy

[bearpaw8491]

Stumbled across this link on youtube and thought you might enjoy. Certainly a far cry from our normal wine making routine; however an Italian neighbor of ours assured me that's pretty close to how his family made their wine.

 

[crushday]

Everything looks like it's pretty dirty. Yikes...

 

[winemaker81]

Everything looks like it's pretty dirty. Yikes...

Conversely, this video may demonstrate that many of the precautions we take don't necessarily matter. Or matter as much as we believe.

Without tasting their wine, we have no idea if we'd like it or not. Some of the people I knew many moons ago happily drank wine that my uneducated palate called "swill", while others made wine that would blow your mind, wine that I was too uneducated to appreciate at that time.

I expect I'd have a good time making wine with these folks. Sometimes the camaraderie is far more important than the circumstances.

 

[milw]

No added yeast right, just what was present on the grapes or in the tank?

 

[Paulie vino]

Makes me feel better about my at times rushed sanitization processes

 

[winemaker81]

No added yeast right, just what was present on the grapes or in the tank?

Probably so. When you have an existing vineyard with known results, the indigenous yeast is fine. For people like me buying west coast grapes while having no clue as to the history? Commercial yeast all the way!

 

[sour_grapes]

Everything looks like it's pretty dirty. Yikes...

Could be worse:

 

[bearpaw8491]

WOW! Don't mean to sound "uppity" but not too sure about "old style" wine making. It's obviously palatable or no one would make it (or be left alive to drink it ) but if I tried either of these methods I'd be guaranteed to end up with vinegar or something worse.
Guess the old style is kinda like sausage making - no one should see how its done!
As Bryan says we may be taking some precautions too far but I think I'll keep driving in my usual direction although I had once considered Natural Fermentation but chickened out!
It would be interesting to try a side by side comparison; maybe some members have. My neighbor says that he much preferred his family's wines from their farm in Italy 70+ yrs ago to the commercial wines of today. Could be what he grew up with or the reason we have chocolate AND vanilla ice cream!
Anyway, keep on stompin' !

 

[Rocky]

Stumbled across this link on youtube and thought you might enjoy. Certainly a far cry from our normal wine making routine; however an Italian neighbor of ours assured me that's pretty close to how his family made their wine.

Wow, does this bring back memories for me. Thank you for posting the clip. This is what we did with a few exceptions. Our wine making area was first a basement and then a converted garage and, as some have pointed out, a couple orders of magnitude cleaner, but essentially the same process.

Some of the major exceptions would be:

1. We stripped the grapes from the stems before crushing them, i.e. the wine did not sit on the stems for any appreciable length of time.
2. The wine that was crushed into the "working barrel" stayed there for 7 to 10 days, depending on the rate of fermentation, not the "3 or 4 days" mentioned in the clip. Then it was moved to the storage barrel, which was kept open on top from mid October to early December. It was my job as a kid to clean the top of the barrels a couple times a day and add wine into the bung hole to keep air out.
3. We prepared our barrels with hot water and then burned a sulfur stick in them and never used salt.

I noticed at least two and possibly three different varieties of grape in the clip. I wish they would have identified the varieties. We co-fermented Zinfandel and Muscat.

 

[wood1954]

Everything looks like it's pretty dirty. Yikes...

Is that part of the terroir?

 

[winemaker81]

WOW! Don't mean to sound "uppity" but not too sure about "old style" wine making.

As @Rice_Guy points out, wine is a preservation system. Once fermentation is well underway, the ABV and acid protect the wine against a lot of things.

People made wine for thousands of years without anything beyond basic cleaning for sanitizing, and it worked. I grew up on a small dairy farm and understood at an early age how much dirt is in everything, something most people in the USA don't know.

From research, my take is that simple cleaning with soap-n-water does the lion's share of the sanitizing process. Use of K-meta or Star San may be unnecessary. However, I sanitize my equipment just in case. I figure that extra bit of sanitizing never hurts and may help.

I'd love to taste their wines. Good, bad, or indifferent, it would be an experience.

 

[Rocky]

Is that part of the terroir?

The use of that pitch fork type tool made me laugh. I see on-line that there are "punch down" tools to break up the cap. Our punch down tool was a 4' length of 2"x4" that we used to break up the cap and stir the wine in the working barrels. When we were finished with it, we just tapped it on the edge of the barrel, replaced the cheese cloth cover and laid it on top. Never seemed to be an issue and from year to year it would just lean against the wall in the crawl space with the empty barrels waiting for the next season.

I was a little surprised by the light color of the finished wine. It could be because there were more white grapes used than were seen in the clip or the brief time on the skins ("3 or 4 days") did not allow for enough color extraction. Reflecting on the year to year variation in the quality of our wines, which we always attributed to the quality of the grapes, some of the variation may have been the result of the less than aseptic environment. Today, with more attention being paid to sanitation and cleanliness, my wines are much more consistent.

 

[wineview]

Wow. Just wow! Sanitation non existent. Feet……oh my. I’ve tasted such wine. It’s a bit hard to get down. When I was young an Italian neighbor made wine like this. He stored it in a fifty gallon barrel. As the level of wine went down it began to taste like vinegar. My winemaking neighbor never even noticed. I wonder what grapes they used in those videos.

 

[ChuckD]

And to think, all this time I’ve been WASHING my equipment

 

[Rice_Guy]

Seeing a dairy farm you watched silage or hay ferment just by putting it in a silo. Grandma had sour kraut ferment by shredding a d adding some salt. It works, and is the technology level they had.

points out, wine is a preservation system. Once fermentation is well underway, the ABV and acid protect the wine against a lot of things.

People made wine for thousands of years without anything beyond basic cleaning for sanitizing, and it worked. I grew up on a small dairy farm and understood at an early age how much dirt is in everything, something most people in the USA don't know.

Another way to look at wine is that it is a progressive cleaning process: remove big stuff that a press can hold back >> remove sugars via yeast >> remove fine solids via gravity >> remove sharp tasting tannin via time

 

[Rocky]

Another way to look at wine is that it is a progressive cleaning process: remove big stuff that a press can hold back >> remove sugars via yeast >> remove fine solids via gravity >> remove sharp tasting tannin via time

You forgot, "removing the wine from the bottle and cleaning the bottle."

 

[bearpaw8491]

Would have loved to be a fly on the wall in your youth Rocky. Agostino - my neighbor - has relayed some very interesting winemaking stories like you. Guess it's like the old adage; "wine makes itself, you just need to get out of the way".
I have always been interested in the "old way" of doing things. I would sit for hours listening to my grandparents talk about their childhood in the mid 1850's (yup, I'm an old geezer!) and I carry with me to this day some of their words of wisdom like:
"Live every day like it was your last. One day you’ll be right!";
"If you want the freshest water, go to the head of the spring" or the best one of all that applies to just about every situation one may find himself in -
"If you can't listen, you can feel" That one came from my 83 yr old maternal grandmother shortly before she administered the "switching of my life". She never had to tell me to do something a second time after that!!!!

 

[Paulie vino]

They said they leave the barrel open for 40 days. What would be the purpose of that?

 

[Rocky]

They said they leave the barrel open for 40 days. What would be the purpose of that?

What they were referring to are the fermenting barrels. They are large barrels lying on their sides with the bung hole pointing upward and with wine filled to about halfway up the bung hole. We used to leave the barrels like this from mid October to early December, at which time the bung was hammered into the hole. Every day, debris (partial skins, marc, dirt, leaf parts, seeds, dead fruit flies, etc.) would bubble out the top and ooze down the sides of the barrel and the wine level would drop due to absorption by the barrel and evaporation. It was my job to wipe off the barrels with a rag and hot water and then fill the bung hole up again so that exposure to air was minimized.

We bunged the barrel around Mid-December and opened it for Easter the next year.

 

[winemaker81]

We should all be envying that kid, who's growing up in a winemaking tradition.