For Sangria type cooking wine: Do not wash the grapes, keep the sugar on the skins, fermentation will sanitize. Remove unripe, blemished grapes to make grape juice vinegar, called verjus, see recipe in here. Crush ripe, unblemished grapes with a handpress till you have a gallon of light pink grape juice. Add stems, seeds and skins back in the grapejuice to add color and sugar for fermentation. Add 1 packet of yeast, stir well, let ferment two weeks in cool place.

For house wine: Each type of red wine grape here produces a slightly different quantity of pure grape juice in our Franceso Colombo manual wine press. Measured without the stems, skins and seeds, as follows:
1 kilogram Mourvedre, 385 ml juice, 16 Brix in August, 20 Brix in September
1 kilogram Tempranillo 425 ml juice, 18 Brix in August, 20 Brix in September
1 kilogram Grenache Noir 400 ml juice, 20 Brix in August and September

For Sangria type cooking wine, Ferment grape juice in wine making pail with lid and water lock. When fermentation stops, siphon into six pint beer bottles with recloseable tops. You now have fresh red wine for cooking. The alcohol percentage in the Sangria will be over 10% because of the added sugar. DO NOT USE BOTTLES WITH SCREWTOPS. Your wine will spoil after a few weeks or months.

For house wine, pick and crush grapes till you fill a five gallon pail. I crush with a heavy magnum wine bottle, then pour in a second pail. Then repeat. I crush the skins and pits and twigs a second time in the handpress. This is the Mourvedre, a small, raspberry flavored deep purple grape with lots of pits. You drill a hole in the center of the lid to install the airlock.

This is the grenache noir grape, a large juicy fruity grape. The moment you have pressed grapejuice with the skins in them, it is called the must. Sprinkle a packet of wine yeast on half a cup of must at room temperature to activate the must, stir, wait an hour till it foams well. If not foaming, start over with fresh packet. Add the activated yeast solution to the pressed grapes as soon as possible to start the fermentation process.

And this is Tempranillo, a high sugar content, deeply flavored wine grape. The grape clusters are large and mature slowly, so you can find green, red, purple grapes and dried raisins on the same cluster. I wait till November. You hand pick off the greens and reds, press and ferment the purples and raisins only, or you end up with a low quality wine.

Ferment two weeks in pails with water lock lids, siphon each kind of wine into its own oak cask. Rest half a year, taste, them mix together. We have a bumper crop this year, picking september, october and november 2023. We call our house wine Chateau Neuf du Papa. DO NOT USE WINE BOTTLES WITH SCREWTOPS. The wine will spoil after a few weeks or months. Use fresh corks and a corker and sanitized wine bottles.