Spanish Secrets: Wine Making- Part One
Wine making? Craig Briggs is told that all he needs to turn his grape harvest into wine is a few buckets, a pair of Wellies and a barrel.
The time is fast approaching when I need to convert my succulently ripe and lovingly cared for grapes into something equally beautiful but even more appetising.
I'm talking about wine of course.
I've made numerous internet explorations to try and find out the secrets of this age-old conversion process but apart from some very useful general knowledge on the I've been unable to find out any specific details that would help in my quest.
With only a few weeks to go until picking I decided to ask our neighbour Mellie if she could help me.
"Of course" she said. “It's simple; all you need is a few buckets, a pair of wellies, and a barrel".
Sounds simple enough, I thought. First thing, a few buckets. At this time of year that’s a simple enough task. All the hardware stores are selling them for grape picking.
Wellies we have, although on later consideration we thought ankle wellies might not be such a good idea. The Wellington boots are for crushing the grapes instead of using your bare feet.
Ankle wellies would almost certainly leave the wearer with very wet feet. And anyone who knows my wife Melanie's feet would understand why wellies are probably our most important piece of equipment. So knee-length wellies it will be.
Our neighbour Mellie had kindly agreed to accompany us in our search and purchase of a barrel. Traditional oak barrels are now very uncommon. Extremely expensive, and very difficult to clean. This left either stainless steel or plastic. An easy enough choice you might think. But with a huge range of different designs and an even larger range of sizes this wasn't going to be as easy as we first thought.
With Mellie in tow our first port of call was an agricultural store on the outskirts of Monforte. The first question the store owner asked was what quantity of grapes we had, I know this seems like a very obvious thing to be asked but we simply weren't prepared with an answer.
I looked at Melanie, Melanie looked at me, then we both looked at Mellie. who in turn looked back at the store owner.
To prompt some sort of response the store owner asked if we had more than 50 kilos, thinking about it logically I came to the conclusion that with some of the largest punches probably weighing a kilo or more that we had at least double that quantity.
"In that case you need something like this" the store keeper said, pointing behind me.
I almost fell over in astonishment. The stainless steel vat stood over 2 metres high (6 feet) and was at least 1 metre in diameter (3 feet).
I'm sure at this point my jaw must have hit the floor. If this was the size of vat required we might firstly have to think about extending our shed - the proposed sight of our wine cellar.
Once again I looked at Melanie and she looked back at me. It was obvious we were both thinking the same thing. Surely this couldn't be the right size for the small amount of grapes we had.
After several minutes of intense discussion we thanked the store keeper for his time and returned to the car where we sat for a while, shoked and disbelieving.
Then, like a bolt of lightening, it hit me. The store keeper had not said 50 kilos of grapes, but 500 kilos.
Mellie had thought the price quite expensive anyway and had already agreed to go with us to the open air market which comes to Monforte twice a month to continue the search for our barrel.
email address
craigandmel@msn.com
