Today’s Adventure: Wine-Making OR: Eat Your Heart Out, Frogs

I was present for the entire wine-making process this year, so now I know how to make wine. Granted, the way the Moldovans make wine is probably not as fancy-pants as the way that the French or Easter Washington or Californian wine companies make it, but you know what? It works. Here’s the process:

You go the field in September or early October and pick all your grapes, on the stems, and throw them all into plastic bags in a horse cart and drag them back to your house. A modest load is an entire horse cart, which is probably upwards of 50-100 pounds of grapes. If you have more fields then you will repeat this process a number of times.

You bring the grapes home where you have your barrels ready. The barrels are likely over 100 years old and made of wood, but they are solid and without cracks. Each has a bung hole in the bottom which has a cork blocking it. You prop them up on low levels created by laying planks of wood over rocks so there is a space below each barrel for drainage.

You throw all the grapes in the barrels. The barrels will be about 3 quarters full. Any fuller and the fermentation will run over the sides and make a mess (and waste wine). You then take a big stick (which, yes, you found on the ground) and “beat” the grapes with it. By this I mean that you shove the stick into the barrels over and over again until you’ve crushed a bunch of the grapes. Then you walk away.

You come back and “beat” the grapes every 2 hours or so to keep crushing them and also to kind of turn them. The grapes start to ferment in the barrels after the first or second day. A purple foam comes up and kind of bubbles at the tops of the barrels. You keep beating them periodically for about a week. You keep them covered with a plastic tablecloth while they are sitting there to keep insects from getting in them.

After a week or so you pull a cork out of the bottom of one of the barrels and wine comes spurting out. The skins and stems of the grapes all float, which means that the liquid you want is all on the bottom. If it tastes like wine, then you’re good to move the barrels into the basement where they will stay for the year to keep the wine cool but not frozen.

This is a tricky part of the process because if the wine is not done fermenting (meaning that there is still sugar in the grapes that has not been burned by the yeast which causes the fermentation process and creates the alcohol) then putting it in the basement can be fatal. Every year in Moldova, people die because carbon monoxide is a bi-product of the fermentation process. This is no problem in the open air but in the basement it can build up and when someone goes down to grab a couple of potatoes they never come up again. So guessing when the process is truly done while also avoiding having your barrels sit out in the elements for weeks is a skill. Most Moldovans are pretty adept at it, however. Well, except the ones that guess wrong every year, I guess….

Once you’ve determined that the wine is done, you scoop all the crap you don’t want (stems, seeds, skins, insects) from the top and dump it into a big contraption that looks like an applesauce maker. It’s a press for all the leftover gunk. The Moldvoans load it all in there and press it to get every last bit of liquid out of it. Then they throw the liquid back into the barrel. When they complete this process they have a big barrel full of only liquid. Then they throw the skins etc to their birds to eat, who then get a little tipsy and sometimes run into trees afterwards.

Once the barrels are in the basement they pull a cork out of the first barrel and stick a spigot in the bung hole. This allows them to turn the wine flow on or off like a faucet throughout the year when they come down to get a pitcher of wine.

And you thought it was a big, fancy process with sniffing and swirling and spitting, didn’t you?

Noapte Buna!