Despite the fact I have a backlog of spirits to make for people, I've been thinking about trying my hand at wine for a while. One fortuitous work trip down to Margaret River (life is so hard sometimes), I decided to see if I could source some good quality wine grapes.

I ended up finding a really helpful viticulturalist listed on the Wine Industry of WA website who was not only happy to sell me locally grown grapes of a wide variety, but was also happy to hook me up with some free grapes as I was after such a small quantity.

As harvest time drew nearer, and after a lot of phone tag with this guy - we eventually sorted out a day for me to head down and pick grapes. After offending my good mate Joe, my girlfiend and I took a day off work and headed down to pick some grapes.

And that we did - whilst I definately favour white wines, the process for making it is a lot more involved - and I'm already having enough trouble reading through Making Good Wine, a fantastic read even if it's nearly completely over my head - I suspect if I continue doing wine, this book is going to become more and more valuable.

Turning up to the vinyard in Yallingup, we were given our choice of Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Merlot and some others I've never even heard of before - and free reign: as the crops hadn't sold we were allowed to take as much or as little as we wanted.

Trying to keep it simple, we grabbed five forty-four litre tubs of grapes: two of merlot, and three of cabernet. I was hoping to split it across a few demijons to make some plain merlot, plain cabernet and blended cabernet merlot table wines - and maybe even some port.

After two hours of picking we had filled our tubs and packed them back into the car and headed back to Perth.

For best results, wine grapes are typically chilled for transport - however as I don't own a refridgerated truck and this is (for now) a once-off, we decided to risk it. As it turns out this was fine, though if we had taken any longer to get back I'm not sure the grapes would have been any happier.

Next in the process: De-stemming and crushing the grapes.

Brewing is going well at das brewhaus. I've finished distilling the last of my second wash with the new run, and I'm getting a reasonable yield to the Still Spirits Turbo yeast, so I'm extra happy.

I managed to pick up a beer hydrometer on the weekend and the second wash came in at a respectable 990 Specific Gravity, which means that most of the available dextrose was consumed by the yeast.

This was just in time to get thrown together into some more Irish Cream mix, about 750mL of which was once again consumed the night of production - leaving me with about 1.25L. I've noticed (accidentally) if you freeze the irish cream mix then thaw it out again that it goes a lot thicker, and I'm wondering how the taste compares to one that hasn't been frozen. I'm wondering if any breakdown/dissolving of sugars/etc from freezing/thawing might improve the taste. I'll keep you all posted.

I spent a few hours last night re-distilling 4 Litres of 40% distillate I had on hand down to 2 Litres of 70%. This translates to a loss of 14% of the ethanol content, but a huge reduction in the amount of non-alcoholic content - meaning I've got a cleaner spirit base to play with.

I'm thinking some of it will be diluted down to 40%, filtered and put into a proper little oak barrel to make some nice bourbon. I'd really like to do a batch of 20 little 1L containers and put them away for a year or so until they've matured.

The other wash I've put together has failed somewhat, it looks like the weird weather (extremely hot days, extremely cold nights) killed the yeast, I've already racked the wash off, so I'll probably just toss it or throw some more yeast in there to reactivate it. This will involve re-sterilising the fermenter, it might just be too hard (tm).

My housemate is thinking about getting into Beer brewing at the moment, which is good because it means I don't have to feel bad about having space in the garage for my spirits stuff. I did have an interesting conversation with his Dad on Saturday though, he swears by brew kits (the syrup and dry yeast kits you get at the supermarket) and is recommending Cameron to not bother with grain based mash at all. I think I might have to intervene and get him to join Joe and I on a brew so he can get some other input. Sure thing he can do a kit brew first, but to do it properly (and there's a lot more to Beer than meets the eye), he should really get his own mash happening.

Next: Buy a second fermenter, fix the other storage cube I have for storing wash, set up a ginger beer plant (next week), and dabble in wine fermentation. The good thing about doing spirits as the primary interest is if I stuff up a Wine, Champagne or Beer - I can distill it and still have something useful at the end of the day.

After that: Get a big boiler setup like Joe :)

Okay so it's been over two weeks since I posted about the brewing thing. Not having done anything for almost a year, I put on another wash somewhat haphazardly with the dextrose sugars and EC118 yeast.

After fermenting for a total of two weeks (longer than I had originally planned for), I started to distill the product. The lower yield from this lot was coming off at approximately 60% ABV and as expected, without the horrible chemical smell from the previous recipe.

I should note for those playing at home that the EC118 yeast is a Wine/Champagne yeast, and the fermented wash goes pink and smells great - very tempting to scoop out a glass and drink it, despite the threat of poisoning from methanol.

I also took the time to redistill the un-drinkable spirits with those chemical notes, which after their second distill and second filter smelt and tasted fantastic.

With the new spirit base I put together a 1.25L bottle of Irish Cream which was promptly drank in its entirity that night by yours truly, a quality recommendation I'm sure. The remaining amount was cut with the re-distilled base and put together into a Hazelnut Liquer.

Next on the shopping list: Second (and maybe third) fermenter; Hydrometer (for pre-distillate measuring); Some kind of reservoir for my in-line carbon filtering.

I'm also thinking about trying my hand with wine and champagne, which are going to be more expensive to play with (and will involve purchasing more kit), but should also prove to be interesting. It would be great to have a bottle of Chateu de Billy House White ;)

I'll keep y'all posted :)