Wine-Making, Step One

Okay, not Step One.

Step One, actually, involves crawling around on the sidewalk in the grapevines and sticking your head under leaves and into places where you just know there will be spiders, but you do it anyway because you think there's going to be jelly at the end of it. And then there isn't. Because you waited too long to pick the g-d grapes, which we've already discussed, and so now we're talking about the wine-making part of the process, which to this point is not any different than the would-be-jelly-making part of the process. Which is this:

Separating the non-food parts from the actual grapey bits.

This photo is not the total non-food collection, obviously. This is just the start. You have to take the whole twenty-two pounds (or however much you have) of grapes, and remove from them the stems, the leaves, the rotten fruit, the unidentifiable animal hair, the cobwebs, and the earwigs.

Oh yes, Beardo, there are earwigs. And they are Legion.