 Without the availability of fossil fuels, we're kind of making use of a lot of resources that otherwise would just go to waste, right? So I'm out here today gathering wild grapes. Wild grapes are growing on apple trees in our orchard that we're taking care of. This orchard and these grapes have largely been abandoned and not taken care of and that's why they've been allowed to grow over these apple trees and in some cases kill them. So this year my goal is to harvest as much of the wild grapes as I can, make wine and jelly, and then I have to take out these wild grape vines because again, they're killing the apple trees, which are, you know, more valuable in terms of what we need to survive here, and they'll become more and more valuable as the years goes on as you know, the things that are available to us now are no longer as easy to get. Wild grapes are not your table grapes. They are, they have a lot of tannins, so they have a lot of tartness to them is a nice way of saying it, and they have really big seeds. They're perfectly good and edible, but they're not just something you'd put on the table and eat, and so making sugar, or excuse me, making jam and wine out of them takes a little bit of a different tactic. Now I have to take these grapes from the bucket, pop the stems off, weigh them out. I need 20 pounds of grapes. I'm making wild grape wine. Never tried it before, but I happened to have the stuff laying around because I bought a wine making kit, so I could use all the equipment to make cider and mead. Turns out it also works for wine. Let's imagine that. All right, so Okay, so after I stripped all the grapes and cracked and mushed them all, I put them in a sack. Sugar and water I'll post a link to the instructions I'm following online, and then I had to add Camden tablets and those kill the wild yeasts. In a perfect world I would just let the yeast, or let the natural yeast do their thing, but I want to not experiment my first time making wild grape wine, so I'm following the instructions exactly. So I added the Camden tablets that kills the yeast. 24 hours later, then I pitched the yeast. Unfortunately, I had filled it up too high and it would have bubbled over, so I have a little extra in here. And today it is really bubbling. And you can see over the night where it must have really bubbled up an inch or two and it's left residue on the side. And this one, it's less bubbly because the sack is still in there with all of the grapes. So I'm turning it around. But the sack is really boulliant because all the yeast is adding CO2 to it. So It's been two days. It's going to be another three to five days, and then this will be done. And now I'm pretty much taking on the same thing again. But this time I'm making wild grape jam. And the neat thing about wild grape jam is these wild grapes have so much pectin on them that I don't need to add pectin. Usually when one adds pectin, which is kind of a naturally occurring fruit. Yes, a fruit binder, and that's what actually makes it into jelly. It makes that jelly cohesion. What do you have to add with these wild grapes? Just have to pick the stems off. Unfortunately, I can't shortcut them like I did with the wine. Okay, and now I'll mash up these grapes that I've collected. Never mind the complete mess down there. The young boy has found our tea hutch, and every day he likes to take all the tea out and inventory it because, you know, gives him something to do. And I'm mashing it right now instead of sending it, you know, using a blender or immersion blender because I don't want to bust open the seeds, because the seeds are much more bitter. I just want to get these things mashed down, release a lot of the water, so that when I start to simmer these they'll just cook themselves. I'm gonna add a little bit of water, probably a couple cups. So we've got three and a half pints of grape jelly with what was left over. So out of ten gallons of grapes, I've made five gallons of wine and three and a half pints of grape. Now it's time to transfer the fermented apple juice, the early wine, the young wine, into a carboy, and that way I can finish fermenting in the basement. It's so purple it looks fake. So that was the extra. And now I have the rest, the main bulk of my wine in this one here, but I have to pull the pulp bag out and let it drip out. Yeah. Well, there you have it. That's our grape processing for this year. Wild grapes is a nice extra crop that we didn't have to spend any time growing, and it's nice to harvest them before we have to pull them off the apple tree. So that's great. Thanks for watching our little clip this week. We'll be making more clips as quickly as we can and then stitching them together in full episodes. So stay tuned, hit the subscribe button. You can visit us on Facebook, Instagram. You can visit us at lowtechinstitute.org to find out more about food and what we do in general. And thanks for watching.