Adventures in Wine-Making, Step -- Oh, Where Was I? Nine? Ten?

Let's see... picking, cleaning, squashing, tearing, straining, fighting, tying, and adding sugar-water. Okay, we're on Step Nine.

Step Nine, then, is adding this:

Half a teaspoon per gallon of must. "Must" means -- well, it probably means either the amount you have in the bucket right now, or else the amount you will have in the bucket after you remove the big fat bag of pulp. It definitely means something, that's for sure. We added 2 1/2 tsp.

Step Eleven is adding this:

This one wants one whole teaspoon per gallon of must. But the neck of the damn bottle is so small you can't get the spoon into it, and it's too lumped up in there to pour out smoothly, so you have to shake it out grain by grain until a big fat lump comes leaping out and smashes on the kitchen floor. Do not sweep those grains up and throw them in the wine. I added five teaspoons -- well, technically, I added one tablespoon and two teaspoons, which equals the same thing. We're obviously working on the assumption that we have five gallons of must, whatever "must" might turn out to be.

Please note: that label denotes this as food grade urea. This does not mean you might as well pee in your wine. I have it on good authority that food grade urea and human pee are not identical at all. Not even close enough for jazz.

Jazz hands, maybe...

Step Twelve is adding this:

These are tablets. I have no idea what's in them, but I know that you're supposed to put in one per gallon. It doesn't say "gallon of must," though, so it could mean per gallon of anything. We used five, just to be consistent. You have to crush the tablets up before you add them but for god's sake don't use the measuring spoons you just used for the urea, because you'll bend them all to hell trying to crush the tablets. Just use a soup spoon. No, you don't have to bleach it first. Why do you ask?

So you put all that stuff in and you stir it with a big-ass spoon, and you put the lid on it with water in the airlock and everything, and then you put it somewhere nobody's going to be tripping over it and now you are all done with Day One. Do absolutely nothing else to the wine until tomorrow.

Don't even take any pictures. Tomorrow, when you add the yeast, you can remember to take some goddamn pictures.


Hm.... I just now noticed that I seem to have skipped over step ten. Step Ten was being told you don't have any yeast Nutrient and fighting about how you should have been told that yesterday when the store was open and you read the recipe, and then looking in the fridge and finding a whole big bottle of it right there on the door where it belongs.

Yeah. That's step ten.