Making Grape Juice

This past weekend our family made grape juice with our very bountiful crop of concord grapes. I have always been working and never had the time to even attempt this in the past. However, this year I am home and I was determined to use make juice out of each and every grape! The first step was to actually pick them. I was amazed at how many we had in our small "vineyard". We really do not have that large of space for them, but we were able to pick four bucketfuls.
Next you have to wash them and take them all off of the vines. Tara was a big help with that. I told her that if she wanted to go on her date later in the evening, that she needed to get all the grapes off the vines before she left-Ha! She did an awesome job ( I think she must have really wanted to go on that date). Note the facial mask she has on in prep for the evening :)
Next you place them in a steam juicer. Then you simply place the lid on and let the steamer do the work. It is amazing how the grapes just shrivel up and release all of their juices.
Soon you start to see the juice appear in the surgical tubing. This is where the juice is collected before being bottled. Emma loved watching the juice come into the tube. It was difficult at times to keep her from filling up the bottles a drop at a time. I had to keep telling her to be patient and let the juice gather.
This is a picture of the grapes shriveling as they are steamed.
You then release the clamp on the surgical tubing and fill the bottles. Emma especially liked this part. Her job was to release the clamp and I held onto the bottles. I wanted to make sure that my floor did not end up purple!

We ended up with 13 quarts of juice. Not too bad for an evening of work. It is very concentrated, so when we go to drink it we will have to dilute it. I am planning to save some for Christmas and Christopher's Homecoming in February. Emma was drinking it as I was filling the jars, so we actually had more than 13 quarts. She loved it! I had to tell her to slow down before she got a tummy ache! If you have never tried this before, I recommend that you give it a whirl. It was a great family activity.