White Wine Grape Processing

The wine grapes should be cool (40-50°F) before they are processed.  The home winemaker may not find this to be practical, but one should try to work with fruit as cool as possible.  The fruit should be clean and free of rot.  Discard any rotten or unripe fruit as needed. 

The next step is to destem and crush the grapes.  If you crush the grapes without removing them from the stem, you may produce wine that has an undesirable "stemmy" taste.  You should also avoid crushing the seeds.  You can use a mechanized crusher or stemmer/crusher for speed, but for smaller lots, you can destem and crush manually.

You will need a press to properly dejuice the crushed grapes.