I made some wine this year

I'm embarassed to mention it, but this year I made some wine. One gallon of it. It's from some back garden vines: Phoenix, Bacchus and Pinot Noir.

Because the back garden in question is a sheltered spot and it has been a warm summer here in London, harvest was early. Last weekend, in fact. While Phoenix is a hybrid cross and doesn't suffer from powdery or downy mildew, it sure does suffer from botrytis. I had to do an individual grape selection to discard the botrytised grapes, which you can see above. I know botrytis is prized by some, but I was worried that some of the rot was actually other fungi, perhaps from the rotten plums on our over-laden plum tree.

Pinot Noir suffered a bit from downy mildew, but the fruit was in fine health, with lovely ripe skins. Bacchus was in good health all round. I sprayed both of these with three lots of sulfur early in the season and one application of Bordeaux mixture in July.

Because I have just a small harvest, I decided to combine the white and red grapes and ferment all of them together, with a five day maceration and then pressing off to a solitary demi-john (1 gallon). No sulpur dioxide was added, but because of the worry about getting the odd rotten grape in the must, with all the acetic acid bacteria that would be colonizing the grape, I used a yeast starter culture to get fermentation going quickly. I also chaptalized a little, because some of the Bacchus wasn't all that ripe.

The wine is currently a mid-pink colour. I will report back.