This Year’s Grape Harvest

I didn’t think I was going to get more than a bunch or two of grapes this year as the chickens devoured the grapes as soon as they started to set.  However, tucked under some of the leaves and in places higher than a chicken can jump I discovered these when starting to cut back the vine.  You can see where the chickens have stripped the bottom halves of the bunches on the table!

So into the kitchen and a short soak in water with a bit of vinegar added.  I believe the acidity of the vinegar helps kill off bacteria but the washing makes sure the fruit is clean of dust and other unwanted stuff.

 

I normally wouldn’t bother taking the grapes off the stalks for steam juicing but looking at the amount of grapes I had, I figured I didn’t have enough to make it worthwhile to process as two batches but thought that if I stripped them I could get them into one batch.

And I did – just!

After steaming for about an hour and a half, I gave the softened grapes a bit of a helping hand with the potato masher to extract as much juice as possible.

And of course a quality control sample had to be tested

I left the grape mush to drain overnight but having previously swished it round with the masher I had extracted more or less everything so I probably wouldn’t bother leaving it overnight next time.  Then it was time to bottle/can it.

Strange isn’t it – the Americans call it canning, the Brits. call it bottling and 99% of the time we are using glass jars; however jarring it doesn’t sound quite right does it?

Because using the masher pushes through pulp and anything else that might have been on the grapes, I decided to strain the juice into the 1 litre jars.  From that one large bucket full of grapes I got a little over 5.5 litres of juice.

Not bad for something I had given up on a month ago!.

As an aside, when the kitchen is full of fruit the fruit flies arrive and proliferate almost before your eyes. 

A quick search came up with this idea: a small dish of cider vinegar into which has been added a few drops of washing-up liquid to reduce the surface tension. 

The fruit flies love it and settle onto the liquid which in normal circumstances they could land on because they are light enough to be held up by the surface tension.  However this is a trap and they drown instead.  The lump of ‘stuff’ in there is a piece of pear core I added as extra incentive to come and drink! 

As you can see it is quite successful.