Destemming by hand

Marc - There's a reason why mechanical destemmers were invented. Destemming by hand is amazingly time-consuming. Two years ago I picked about 100# of grapes locally, and had to destem and crush them by hand. The destemming process took me 8 hours or more -- far more than it took to pick the grapes in the first place. The variety I picked (called Frontenac - a recent hybrid) comes out about the size of blueberries, so there are a whole lot of grapes per cluster. I finally managed to rig up a way to crush the grapes (using a tomato crusher), but the destemming was all manual. The 100# of grapes yielded between 6 and 7 gallons of wine -- not a whole lot, really, for the time it took.

You are welcome to destem by hand if you feel the urge. Be warned, however, that it will likely take a good deal longer than you would guess; you might want to have a backup plan lined up, if you are intending to do any significant volume of grapes.

Best of luck, and happy fermenting . . .

Doug

Marc,

Some people recommend using a plastic milk crate with small bottom holes to "scrub" the grapes through, leaving the stems behind. I've tried it in the past and it works fairly well, somewhere between hand & mechanical destemming. Just place the crate over your fermenter, dump in enough grapes to about cover the bottom and start rubbing the grapes through.

BTW, I now use a mechanical destemmer, but I agree that it's less than ideal from a quality standpoint, at least with Eastern grapes, where you often want to remove all the green stems. I find thet the stems get a bit broken up and some passes through with the grapes. Often I'd rather have no stem matter at all in the must, but large batches make this impossible.

Hi....any problem with just crushing a few lbs. at a time using a large piece of wood or whatever and then fishing out the stems?.....I did that last fall with 72 lbs. of zin grapes.....would have been very difficult to remove by hand before crushing ....but I wonder if this imparted too much stem flavor to the wine.....with this zin wine it's gonna take a while til it ages enough to know for sure.....andy j.

I find the highest quality wine is made with the method of hand destemming each individual grape one at a time and squeezing it into the must with your index finger and thumb. Even milk crates can impart some "green" taste due to it's "abrasive" nature. Last year it took me

4 days to make 1 gallon of wine but the quality is superb.

Just kidding ! :).

Bob

We hand destemmed 1800 lbs - 900 cab, 900 zin last year using a stainless steel tub with 5/8" holes in the bottom. Same concept as the milk crate. The destemmer has tabs on it to hook on top of a barrel. We dumped the crushed grapes into the destemmer and scrubbed the grapes off. Took about 6 hours to crush and destem 1800 lbs - well worth the effort. Bought the destemmer (and the grapes) at

Steve

Hehehehe snort snort hehe! Louise:o)

So the two options being considered are:

1) Destem by hand so you do not treat the grapes roughly. Then crush the grapes in some way.

2) Destem with a mechanical destemmer which will also crush the grapes.

The only difference I could see would not be in rough treatment. Doing it by hand would cause less contact with the stems. I cannot even imagine a commercial vineyard hand destemmng.

Ray

The first couple of years we destemmed by hand. It took us ~30 man hours to destem 800#. Three years ago we picked up a crusher-destemmer and never looked back. Even with the machine it still takes 4 hours or so to cull through the grapes and get rid of the undesirable stuff. Some of the stems make it into the must but the savings in time is a good tradeoff for a few stems.

Frank

Steve Landis wrote:

You missed option 3) Crush then destem by hand.

Steve

True, That would yield greater contact of the juice with the stems which could be a good/bad thing, depending on your point of view.

Ray

I think all this about treating the grapes gingerly and avoiding every stem might be paranoia. Many winemakers add stems back to the wine. Last year my family made 600lbs of Cabernet and 400 lbs of Muscat wine by crushing and then desteming by hand. We don't have a mechanical crusher so my sister, wife, and wine making partners girlfriend wash up and jump into 44 gallon food grade trash cans and crush about 12-18 inches of grapes at a time. When the grapes are properly crushed the stems separate easily and we just scoop them out by hand. I have not noticed any harsh flavors in the wine and Jeff Cox's book "From Vines to Wines" says he recommends this method for smaller batches because it is fun. I agree and am planning to make 1000lbs of cabernet the same way this season.

-Alex

Here's what we did: Open 36 or 42 lb box of grapes Dump into plastic milk crate for a water rinse Rinse with spray and let water drip out Dump grapes into crusher Crushed grapes fall into large pan with handles Repeat Pan now has the contents of 2 boxes of grapes - crushed Pan of crushed grapes is dumped into the destemmer which is positioned on top of the fermenter (aka open 55 gal plastic barrel) Juice immediately falls through the holes in destemmer Grapes are rubbed off of stems by hand Stems are discarded

I would estimate the contact of the juice with the stems is about 3 to 5 minutes. Is this enough time for juice/stem contact to be an issue?

After 3 months in French Oak and 3 months in bottles, the results have been good.

Steve

Alex, the problem is not the stem himself. The problem is that you will damage the stem when you crush first with a crusher and you will get some harsh tannin for this reason and only if the stem are "green stem", ie. not fully mature wood. There is not problem (and it's the best way of adding natural tannin) with adding stem back to the primary fermenter if they had not been mechanically crushed. The way you are doing it is a very good technique for the wine and a funny traditionnal way :)

Feet are relatively soft, so the stems are not really damaged crushing with feet. It works, but it might be good advice to put bread bags over the feet to keep the skin from drying out... If the wood is green it just bends and goes with the flow (bad pun); if it's browner and more mature it's not an issue anyway.

I have destemmed and crushed 200# by hand and it takes a lot of time;

200 pounds in a crusher stemmer is done in a few minutes. By hand is available 24/7, so more often than not that's what I do.

I have an old press I have never put back together, maybe this year. Usually I use a few 6 gallon pails as my press, one to catch the wine, one with a bunch of 1/8" holes in it for the press basket, another one on top as the press mechanism. I just stand in it; it looks goofy but the wine comes out fine all the time. You can't over press with something this primitive and there was no cost involved, it's all from scrap and a little more labor...

Regards, Joe

...We don't have a mechanical crusher so my sister,