He used to make his own wine. He was from Italy. Abruzzi. Anyways I was asking my mom about this wine he used to make and from what I understand he used to just smash up the grapes (moscatel I think) and throw everything in the barrel. Stems and all. I remember hearing that his wine was very…dry.
What do wine people/snobs think of his “technique”?
Most oenophiles would say that excessive stems would add too much tannin, and make the wine taste “tannic”, or even “green” since these are green stems. Also, he was trusting that the wine would ferment properly with wild yeasts, and that might not work every time. If it did work, it might have been as good as any other homemade wine. You seem to have left off the extracting step(squeezing the crushed fermented berries through rollers to extract juice), maybe they just left that part off for you, as it is a pretty important step. My relatives made wine you grandfathers way, and they’d never make wine any other way.
I want to say that he had some kind of press, and a couple times I remember my uncle squashinh grapes with his barefeet. But he had this thing with a spike covered cylinder in his later years that I recall.
Crushing with the feet is an old fashioned way to break the berries without crushing the seeds, which adds bitterness. Foot crushing is hard work – its repetitive, and tiring, the grapes dye your legs black (not purple, there’s a color reaction of some sort), and the acid level of good quality wine grapes will chap the skin on your toes badly. To say nothing of the possibility of tripping and falling on slippery grapes, there’s probably a Youtube video out there of one famous occurrence. The spike covered cylinder is a more modern way to crush grapes. You have to get the spacing just right for the best crush. So yeah, he would have used a press (not rollers, my bad) after fermentation – 'tho I remember my relatives using it before, they used to give us kids the unfermented grape juice. It was practically black, and syrupy sweet, but otherwise, just like store bought grape juice.
That would be red grapes, moscatel is white.
My sister in law inherited a small vineyard of moscatel from her father; one of the neighbors who actually lives in the village where the yard is offered to take care of it for half the grapes. Bro has made both grape juice and white wine, pretty much by the techniques described, minus adding solids back: press the grapes, place the juice (unfiltered) in bottles and either add some wine from the previous year as “yeast seed” or home pasteurize.
Just for kicks, in Spanish “pressing” grapes is called “stepping on” grapes, pisar, unlike olives, sunflower seeds or corn for which the verb is prensar (to press, as in English). Stepping on sunflower seeds wouldn’t get you a lot of oil 