Making wine is very common in Moldova. I do not know about all of Moldova, but in my village the majority of people have at least a few grape vines. After working at the Ohio Department of Agriculture (http://www.agri.ohio.gov/) and seeing how the department helps wine producers in Ohio and markets Ohio wines I became very interested in wine (http://www.tasteohiowines.com/). While Ohio is not necessarily the first state you think of when it comes to wine production, you might be surprised at how many wineries there are in Ohio and the high quality iced and other styles of wine made.
My parents currently live on a little plot of land that has a spring at the bottom of a little valley. I have dreams of making a little winery, bed-and-breakfast and/or having my own vinery on this land. We will see, after these two years in Moldova, I should have a pretty good idea about how to make house wine.
In the fall my host family prunes the grape vines and turns the soil over by hand with spades. Then the plants are pretty much left to grow on their own throughout the spring and summer. My host family has white and red grapes. My observation is that making red wine is more popular in Moldova. My host family only made red wine (both red and white grapes were combined together).
Before we even picked the grapes, I helped my host father bring up the empty wine barrel from the basement and he opened it up to clean it. He left the crystallized wine in the barrel for the taste but cleaned everything else that was in there. The last thing that was done was to pour hot water with walnut leaves boiled in it for taste and also to help find any leaks.
It depends on the year, but in 2010 they harvested the grapes in September by hand. The grapes are crushed by a hand-cranked machine which drops the grapes and stems into a large oak barrel. The barrels are usually covered to try to keep the yellow jackets and other sweet-toothed insects out. They sit in the barrels for a couple of weeks to ferment, you can here/see them bubble.
During the fermentation period we drink a lot of musk which is pretty much grade juice. It is just the juices of the grapes and it does not have the taste of stems or grape skins. It is very good and it taste like non-alcohol sparkling grape juice that as my host father says “Hits the tongue not the head”.
After the wine had been fermenting long enough and the barrel was ready we started to press the wine. It was a couple day processes to make sure we got everything out of the grapes. We put the wine barrel in the basement and brought buckets of the pressed wine into the basement to pour in the barrel. We kept the door open to the basement for a while to make sure any CO2 created by the fermentation process would leave the basement.
It will take a while for the wine to fully develop, it taste much different than the wine made last year.
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