I took over a well established grape vine of 30 years old, one red, one white. both are wine grapes apprently. i have a ton of grapes on the vine all looking good. do i need to take off some ..all...of the vine leaves to help the grapes ripen now? i have cut back many of the runners after the grapes were set and this seems to have help the fruit. I know that they should be ripening by oct/nov..
then the next problem arrives...what do i do with all these grapes? i have no wine making equipment...any one with some spare demijohns..and wine bottles?
I recently bought some plastic demijohns on the internet, they're much cheaper than the glass ones and seem to work well. But all they are is a 5litre plastic water bottle with a hole drilled in the lid so that the airlock and a rubber seal type thing can fit through the lid, you could quite easily make it yourself. For wine bottles, go to your local recycling point or amenity skip, you might find some there, I'm using the ones with screw on tops rather than corks. Or ask your neighbours and friends to save some for you. :)
Find a toddler...they seem to eat them by the tonne. ::)
Baz has a vine (not my cup of tea, I'm a leek and tattie girl) and the little un found the ripe grapes before anyone else, and there were only stalks left!
Caz
even though there wine grapes you can still eat them, so give them away until you get your wine making stuff. :-*
Yes you remove leaves, I've never removed all. Just quite a lot to let the sun get through.
If you have no equipment and can't afford it, you can make acceptable wine in a bucket (food grade) as long as you keep the flies out. I've found in the past that fine net curtain (usually available from local charity shop) or muslin, or sheet, sterilised by boiling water, tied tightly over top of bucket keeps them out.
Wine bottles - stand by your local glass recycling container and wait for people to arrive and hijack them. Or go to your local wine bar/restaurant on Wednesday night and make arrangements to collect from them on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. You will need to buy clean corks though. the push in ones with plastic tops are fine if you have got cork inserter. Or I suppose you could resort to empty screw top plastic emonade bottles, which I used once. I'm trying desparately to think of a cheap alternative to corks, but nothing springs to mind except rolled up cotton sheeting made into a plug and sealed with sealing wax. Mind you the sealing wax will probably cost you more than the corks.