Every year my family makes wine, every since I could remember one thing my family would always do every October was make wine. Both my grandparents were born and raised in Italy until the moved to America, when their families moved to America both my grandma and grandfather made wine every year with their families. My whole family gets together at my grandparents house where everyone gets dirty to squeeze the grapes to make wine. My two youngest cousins have been around this since they were born and they are now three and five and can not wait to make wine every year.
Making wine is not just a one day and done type of thing it takes days. First the grapes are delivered to my grandparents house in portions on the first day 20 cases of white and red grapes are crushed through the machines to start to get all the juice out of the grapes then it sits overnight until the other 20 cases of grapes get delivered and crushed. Once both sets of grapes are crushed, they have to sit for three days. After the three days are over we squeeze the grapes. This is when everyone comes to my grandparents house and spend the whole day squeezing grapes. My family usually starts doing this around 10:00 in the morning and it does not stop until midnight depending how fast everyone works. For the past couple my grandma has been getting shirts made for everyone which just makes getting messy more fun.

After the three days the grapes are ready to be squeezed. Before the grapes can be put into the squeezer most of the stems need to be removed. Once the stems are removed the juice in the big pastic barrel with the crushed grapes is taken out little by little and put into barrels. The reaming grapes in the big barrel get put into the sqeezer for the rest of the jucie to come out of the grapes. The squeezer is a manual machine that the grapes are put in to with a piece of metal on top of the that pus
hed the grapes down to get as much juice out of the grapes as we can. The juice that comes out of the sqeezer is also put into wooden barrels after it is done. This past year we squeezed over 80 gallons of grapes and got 3 barrels of wine. Once all the juice is put into the barrels the juice needs to sit for 40 days until it can become wine. When the grape juice is fermenting into wine the barrels do not get closed because when the juice is feremnting it bubbles and if enough pressure stays in the barrels they can break or brust since they are wooden.