One of the nice things about living in a vineyard in Napa Valley is that you get to make wine from gleaning the grapes.  

 Fall mornings are either foggy and cold, or extremely hot. After the first frost, the leaves start turning the most gorgeous colors of red and gold. Seasons do change here and the fall colors are magnificent.

 The winery allowed us to go in and gather a few grapes last year.  I used my family's old prune boxes to measure out how many lugs we would need to put together a small batch for the carboys.




I have a small press I bought so we can press pears and apples.  I love the thing and it is great for all sorts of lovely food products.  Grape fermentation isn't really a bodily fluid of any sort, so this really doesn't apply to me in any way, except that wine really goes with cheese!

My friend Fritz and I decided to make wine a few years ago, and these are the pictures.  I got out the press, but we found one of the locks was missing for the transmission. Crapity craps!  Mr Fritz and I decided we could work around that. He said two old Italians should be able to get around it.  I didn't want to use our feet.

 Fritz has massive hands. He decides to crush the grapes with his hands.  Fritz is bad ass.  Here is some juice! It took a while.  He works faster if you talk about people he needs to kill.

Here he is, thinking about people he wants dead.  He does not like to be interrupted when he is squishing the heads of people he wants dead.  I like it.

We squished about 70 pounds of grapes and got almost a carboy full. I would not do this by hand again because you can see how much we lost.  I also was really disappointed in the way the wine turned out. It continued a slow fermentation because we didn't use sulfides to kill off the yeast when the wine was perfect.  I did like our labels!!