How to Grow Long Island Grapes in Your Backyard

You don’t need to live on a winery to grow Long Island grapes for making jams and wine. Or maybe you just want to pop them in your mouth for a snack! Learn how to plant and harvest juicy grapes in your own garden by following these instructions.  

Discover how to grow grapes, and you’ll enjoy the amazing pleasure of picking a grape fresh off the vine and popping it into your mouth. When you bite into a grape that’s warm from the sun and bursting with juice, you’ll be hooked on growing grapes on your own.

When we think of growing grapes, we dream of green or purple table grapes (the kind you eat fresh), jams and jellies, raisins, or perhaps a good wine grape, just in case you want to make your own Cabernet.

Knowing how to grow grapes successfully means selecting the right variety for your region. Grapes will grow in almost any part of the country but you need to choose one that suits your local conditions of summer heat and winter cold. Your local extension office can suggest a specific variety, whether it be table or wine.

Grapes need full sun all day no matter the region you live in, and well-drained soil that’s free of weeds and grass—you don’t want any competition for water and nutrients. Think of all those pictures you’ve seen of the Long Island vineyards—that’s what you’re aiming for.

Planting Long Island Grapes

Plant grapes in early spring, when you’ll find bare-root varieties available. As you plant, cut the existing root back to 6 inches; this will encourage feeder roots to grow near the trunk. The root system of a grapevine can grow deep, so well-cultivated soil is best. You will probably need to do some pruning at planting time, too. Prune off all except for one stem, and then look for the buds on the stem; cut the stem back to only two buds. You’re on your way.

Fertilizing Long Island Grapes

The first two or three years, each early spring, apply a nitrogen fertilizer. You may not have to do this as the vines mature; it all depends on your observation. Do the vines look vigorous and healthy? Maybe you don’t need any fertilizer.

Pruning Long Island Grapes

Learn how to grow grapes trained on a vertical trellis or on an overhead arbor. You can decide which method fits into your garden better, but be sure to have the supports in place before you plant the vines. On a vertical trellis, branches from the previous year’s growth are selected to grow along the wires of the trellis or fence. The buds along the stems will flower and set fruit. Just like a fence, the trellis can have two or three levels, and the center stem is left to grow up to the next level.

If you’d like to see your grapes hanging down from overhead, you can train the vines that way, still shortening the branches and selecting just a few to secure to the metal or wood arbor.

The technique for how to grow the most productive grapes is good pruning practices. Pruning grapes and the training techniques may sound complicated, but they don’t need to be. Each dormant season, keep a few stems that grew last year, and train them on the wires or trellis. You’ll probably have to shorten them to fit your space. Prune everything else off. It’s shocking to see how much you will cut off, but your grapes will grow better because of it. You’ll see buds on the remaining growth; each of those buds will produce several shoots that grow leaves and flowers.

Vines can overproduce grapes. This isn’t a case of too much of a good thing, because overproduction leads to poor-quality fruit. Avoid this by thinning flower clusters that look misshapen and cutting off fruit clusters that develop poorly.

Don’t jump the gun on harvesting; grapes won’t improve in taste after you pick, so sample a grape or two occasionally until they are ripe. Then get busy picking!

#1 Way to Make Your Own Homemade Grape Juice/Wine

Clearly there’s nothing better than to make your own homemade grape juice unless your changing it into wine. Here’s a great article from ELISE BAUER. Step-by-step instructions with photos on how to make your own grape juice from scratch. If your looking to make wine, well here’s a good starting point. Changing grape juice into wine now that’s a tricky process. Late September and early October is Concord Grape season in Long Island’s North Fork’s – East End.

We used to make Grape juice from Welch’s frozen concentrate; sometimes the lid didn’t come off so easily and splat there went a purple goopy mess all over our shirts.

If you have never had fresh, homemade grape juice, I assure you, you are missing out; it’s nothing like anything you can buy in a store. It’s more like nectar than store bought juice, thick and smooth. We like to dilute it with sparkling water. Over the years we’ve learned that to make your own  homemade grape juice it doesn’t really freeze well; it just doesn’t taste nearly as special upon defrosting. So when it’s in season, we drink it up.

This recipe uses Concord grapes which, according to my friends in Concord, Mass, still grow wild around those parts. I’m pretty sure you could use this grape juice recipe with any kind of sweet grape you like. Home Made Grape Juice Recipe

INGREDIENTS

Equipment needed

• A colander for rinsing the grapes
• 1 large, 12-quart pot
• 1 large 6 or 8-quart pot
• A very large fine mesh sieve, or cheesecloth

1. Pick the grapes. Get a large basket, wear long sleaves and a hat, bring clippers, and fill up the basket with grape bunches. Keep in mind that a pound of grapes will yield a little less than a cup of juice.

2. Rinse and de-stem the grapes. Put grapes in a basin filled with water. Then rinse the individual grapes, picking them away from the stem, collecting the grapes in a large bowl, and discarding the green unripe and old shriveled grapes.

3. Mash the grapes. With a potato masher, mash away at the grapes so the juice begins to flow. If you have picked a lot of grapes, you may need to work in batches. We have found it easiest to mash about 4 lbs of grapes at a time.

4. Cook the grapes. Put the mashed grapes into a large stockpot. Slowly heat the grapes and juice to a simmer on medium heat and then simmer for 10 minutes. Stir occasionally so that the grapes don’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Halfway through cooking mash some more, breaking up as many of the remaining grapes as possible.

5. Prepare sieve or cheesecloth. Get another large pot, place a large fine mesh sieve over it. Alternatively you can cover it with two layers of cheesecloth, secure with a rubber band. Make sure pot is sitting on a plate to catch any juice that may run over.

6. Strain grape mixture. Ladle grape mixture over fine mesh sieve or cheesecloth to strain. Let sit for several hours or overnight in the refrigerator to strain completely.

7. Finishing. Remove sieve or cheesecloth.* Note that sediment will have formed on the bottom of the container. Rinse out the sieve or cheesecloth and strain the juice again, to filter out some of the sediment. Pour or ladle juice into containers. Enjoy your juice!

* Note that the grape mash can be composted. NOW if your looking to make wine here’s a great video

HOW TO MAKE WINE

Have you ever wanted to make homemade wine? Here’s how.

Red wine and carafe | Photo by Meredith

In theory, making wine is very simple, especially if you have already made your grape juice.  Now yeast meets grape juice in an environment that allows fermentation. It’s such a natural process that wine was probably first discovered by happy accident thousands of years ago: Natural yeasts, blowing in the wind, settled down upon a bunch of squashed grapes, whose juice was pooling in the shaded bowl of a rock. After fermenting, some lucky passerby stops and stoops down for a taste…and likes what he discovers.  From there, the process of winemaking will be refined, as you can imagine, and the environment carefully controlled, to the point where winemaking becomes both science and art.

And DIY home winemaking? Well, it probably falls somewhere between the curious stone-age wanderer and the modern vintner who applies artful science to the process.

At any rate, winemaking at home requires several pieces of inexpensive equipment, serious cleanliness, and a mess of patience. Turns out, Tom Petty was right: “The waiting is the hardest part.”

Equipment Checklist:

• One 4-gallon food-grade-quality plastic bucket and lid to serve as the primary fermentation vat
• Three 1-gallon glass jugs to use as secondary fermentation containers
• A funnel that fits into the mouth of the glass bottles
• Three airlocks (fermentation traps)
• A rubber cork (or bung) to fit into the secondary fermentation container
• Large straining bag of nylon mesh
• About 6 feet of clear half-inch plastic tubing
• About 20 wine bottles (you’ll need 5 bottles per gallon of wine)
• Number 9-size, pre-sanitized corks
• Hand corker (ask about renting these from the wine supply store)
• A Hydrometer to measure sugar levels

Ingredient Checklist:

• Lots and lots of wine grapes
• Granulated sugar
• Filtered water
• Wine yeast

To the above basic list you can refine the process by adding such things as Campden tablets to help prevent oxidation, yeast nutrients, enzymes, tannins, acids, and other fancy ingredients to better control your wine production.

Making Wine

Part 1

• Ensure your equipment is thoroughly sterilized and then rinsed clean. (Ask at the wine supply store about special detergents, bleaches, etc.). It’s best to clean and rinse your equipment immediately before using.
• Select your grapes, tossing out rotten or peculiar-looking grapes.
• Wash your grapes thoroughly.
• Remove the stems.
• Crush the grapes to release the juice (called “must”) into the primary fermentation container. Your hands will work here as well as anything. Or go old school and stomp with your feet. If you’re making a lot of wine, you might look into renting a fruit press from a wine supply store.
• Add wine yeast.
• Insert the hydrometer into the must. If it reads less than 1.010, consider adding sugar. If you’re adding sugar, first dissolve granulated sugar in pure filtered water (adding sugar helps boost low alcohol levels). Stir the must thoroughly.
• Cover primary fermentation bucket with cloth; allow must to ferment for one week to 10 days. Over the course of days, fermentation will cause a froth to develop on top and sediment to fall to the bottom.

Making Grape Juice into Wine| Photo by Meredith

Part 2

• Gently strain the liquid to remove the sediment and froth.
• Run the juice through a funnel into sanitized glass secondary fermentation containers. Fill to the top to reduce the amount of air reaching the wine.
• Fit the containers with airlocks.
• Allow the juice to ferment for several weeks.
• Use the plastic tube to siphon the wine into clean glass secondary fermentation containers. Again, the purpose here is to separate the wine from sediment that forms as the wine ferments.
• Continue to siphon the wine off the sediment periodically (this is called “racking”) for 2 or 3 months until the wine is running clear.

Part 3

• Run the wine into bottles (using the cleaned plastic tubing), leaving space for the cork plus about a half inch or so of extra room.
• Insert corks.
• Store the wine upright for the first three days.
• After three days, store the wine on its side at, ideally, 55 degrees F. For red wine, age for at least 1 year. White wine can be ready to drink after only 6 months.

We hope you enjoyed these 2 articles that we put together and hope you’ll try either to make your own homemade grape juice or turning it into home made Wine yourselves. Lets not forget if you want to do some wine tastings then LI Vineyard Tours® is the transportation company for you.

Please call us at (516)-WINE-TOURS / (516)-946-3868 anytime to schedule a Long Island Wine Tour.

Learn How to Taste Wine on Long Island

Here is a GREAT article on learning how to Taste Wine. Their are generally 4 basic steps to learn how to taste wine. The following wine tasting tips are practiced by sommeliers to refine their palates and sharpen their ability to taste and recall wines. Even though this method is used by pros, it’s actually quite simple to understand and can help anyone to improve their wine palate.

Anyone can taste wine, all you need is a glass of wine and your brain. There are 4 steps to wine tasting but lets not forget, not to drive when you are tasting wine.

1. Look: A visual inspection of the wine under neutral lighting
2. Smell: Identify aromas through orthonasal olfaction (e.g. breathing through your nose)
3. Taste: Assess both the taste structure (sour, bitter, sweet) and flavors derived from retronasal olfaction (e.g. breathing with the back of your nose)
4. Think/Conclude: Develop a complete profile of a wine that can be stored in your long term memory.

How to Taste Wine

1. Look

Check out the color, opacity, and viscosity (wine legs). You don’t really need to spend more than 5 seconds on this step. A lot of clues about a wine are buried in its appearance, but unless you’re tasting blind, most of the answers that those clues provide will be found on the bottle (i.e. the vintage, ABV and grape variety).

2. Smell

When you first start smelling wine, think big to small. Are there fruits? Think of broad categories first, i.e. citrus, orchard, or tropical fruits in whites or, when tasting reds, red fruits, blue fruits, or black fruits. Getting too specific or looking for one particular note can lead to frustration. Broadly, you can divide the nose of a wine into three primary categories:

• Primary Aromas are grape-derivative and include fruits, herbs, and floral notes.
• Secondary Aromas come from winemaking practices. The most common aromas are yeast-derivative and are most easy to spot in white wines: cheese rind, nut husk (almond, peanut), or stale beer.
• Tertiary Aromas come from aging, usually in bottle, or possibly in oak. These aromas are mostly savory: roasted nuts, baking spices, vanilla, autumn leaves, old tobacco, cured leather, cedar, and even coconut.

3. Taste

Taste is how we use our tongues to observe the wine, but also, once you swallow the wine, the aromas may change because you’re receiving them retro-nasally.

• Taste: Our tongues can detect salty, sour, sweet, or bitter. All wines are going to have some sour, because grapes all inherently have some acid. This varies with climate and grape type. Some varieties are known for their bitterness (i.e. Pinot Grigio), and it manifests as a sort of light, pleasant tonic-water-type flavor. Some white table wines have a small portion of their grape sugars retained, and this adds natural sweetness. You can’t ever smell sweetness though, since only your tongue can detect it. Lastly, very few wines have a salty quality, but in some rare instances salty reds and whites exist.
• Texture: Your tongue can “touch” the wine and perceive its texture. Texture in wine is related to a few factors, but an increase in texture is almost always happens in a higher-alcohol, riper wine. Ethanol gives a wine texture because we perceive it as “richer” than water. We also can detect tannin with our tongue, which are that sand-paper or tongue-depressor drying sensation in red wines.
• Length: The taste of wine is also time-based, there is a beginning, middle (mid-palate) and end (finish). Ask yourself, how it takes until the wine isn’t with you anymore?

4. Think

Did the wine taste balanced or out of balance (i.e. too acidic, too alcoholic, too tannic)? Did you like the wine? Was this wine unique or unmemorable? Were there any characteristics that shined through and impressed you?

Practice With The Video!

Grab a glass of wine and practice the 4-step tasting method guided by sommelier, Madeline Puckette.

Taste Wine the Right Way

Getting past the “wine” smell: it can be difficult to move beyond the vinous flavor. A good technique is to alternate between small, short sniffs and slow, long sniffs.

Learn to Swirl: The act of swirling wine actually increases the number of aroma compounds that are released into the air.

Find More Flavors When You Taste: Try coating your mouth with a larger sip of wine followed by several smaller sips so that you can isolate and pick out flavors. Focus on one flavor at a time. Always be thinking from broad-based flavors to more specific ones, i.e. the general “black fruits” to the more specific, “dark plum, roasted mulberry, or jammy blackberry.”

Improve Your Tasting Skills Faster: Comparing different wines in the same setting will help you improve your palate faster, and it also makes wine aromas more obvious. Get a flight of “tastes” at your local wine bar, join a local tasting group, or gather some friends to taste several wines all at once. You’ll be shocked by how much side-by-sides of different varieties will show you!

Overloaded With Aromas? Neutralize your nose by sniffing your forearm.

How to Write Useful Tasting Notes: If you’re someone who learns by doing, taking tasting notes will be very useful to you. Check out this useful technique on taking accurate tasting notes.

A Detailed look at the 4 Steps for Tasting Wine:

Step 1: Look

How to Judge the Look of a Wine: Color and opacity of wine can give you hints as to the approximate age, the potential grape varieties, the amount of acidity, alcohol, sugar, and even the potential climate (warm vs. cool) where the wine was grown.

Age: As white wines age they tend to change color, becoming more yellow and brown, with an increase in overall pigment. Red wines tend to lose color, becoming more transparent as time goes on.

Potential Grape Varieties: Here are some common hints you can look for in the color and rim variation –

• Often Nebbiolo and Grenache-based wines will have a translucent garnet or orange color on their rim, even in their youth.
• Pinot Noir will often have a true-red or true-ruby color, especially from cooler climates.
• Malbec will often have a magenta pink rim.

Alcohol and Sugar: Wine legs can tell us if the wine has high or low alcohol and/or high or low sugar. The thicker and more viscous the legs, likely the more alcohol or residual sugar contained in the wine.

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Step 2: Smell

How to Judge the Smell of Wine: Aromas in wine nearly give away everything about a wine; from grape variety, whether or not the wine was oak-aged, where the wine is from, and how old the wine is. A trained nose and palate can pick all these details out.

Where Do Wine Aromas Actually Come From?

Aromas like “sweet Meyer lemon” and “pie crust” are actually aroma compounds called stereoisomers that are captured in our noses from evaporating alcohol. It’s like a scratch and sniff sticker.  A single glass can have hundreds of different compounds, which is why people smell so many different things. It’s also easy to get lost in language though, since all of us interpret individual aromas in related, but slightly different ways. Your “sweet Meyer lemon” may be my “tangerine juice”. We’re both talking about a sweet citrus quality in the wine. We’re both correct–we’re just using slightly different words to express the idea.

Wine Aromas Fall into 3 Categories:

Primary Aromas: Primary aromas come from the type of the grape and the climate where it grows. For instance, Barbera will often smell of licorice or anise, and this is because of compounds in Barbera grapes themselves, not because of a close encounter with a fennel bulb. Generally speaking, the fruit flavors in wine are primary aromas. If you’d like to see some examples, check out these articles:

• Identifying Fruit Flavors in Wine
• 6 Common Flower Flavors Found in Wine
• Red & Dark Fruit Flavors in Several Wine Varieties

Secondary Aromas: Secondary aromas come from the fermentation process (the yeast). A great example of this is the “sourdough” smell that you can find in Brut Champagne that is sometimes described as “bready” or “yeasty.” Yeast aromas can also smell like old beer or cheese rind. Another common secondary aroma would be the yogurt or sour cream aroma that comes from malolactic fermentation. All-and-all, some of these aromas are quite bizarre.

Tertiary Aromas: Tertiary aromas (sometimes referred to as “bouquets”) come from aging wine. Aging aromas are attributed to oxidation, aging in oak, and/or aging in bottle over a period of time. The most common example of this is the “vanilla” aroma associated with wines aged in oak. Other more subtle examples of tertiary aromas are the nutty flavors found in aged vintage Champagne. Often, tertiary aromas will modify primary aromas, with the fresh fruit of a youthful wine changing to be more dried and concentrated as it develops.

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Step 3: Taste

How to Judge the Taste of Wine: With practice you could be able to blind taste a wine down to the style, regio,n and even possible vintage! Here are the details on what to pay attention to.

Sweetness:

The best way to sense sweetness is on the front of your tongue in the first moment you taste a wine. Wines range from 0 grams per liter residual sugar (g/l RS) to about 220 g/l RS. By the way, 220 will have a consistency close to syrup! Sweet table wines are only traditionally made in Alsace, Germany, and the Loire Valley from white grapes, so if you’re finding sweetness in a red wine that isn’t dessert-style or Manischewitz, you’ve got something weird on your hands!

• Dry Wines Most people would draw the line for dry wines at around 10 g/l of residual sugar, but the human threshold of perception is only 4g/l. Most Brut Champagne will have around 6-9 gl/. Your average harmoniously sweet German Riesling has about 30 or 40 g/l.
• Acidity Matters Wines with high acidity taste less sweet than wines with low acidity, because we generally perceive the relationship between sweetness and acidity, not the individual parts. Coke has 120 g/l but tastes relatively “dry” because of how much acidity it has! Coke’s really high acid is why you can also melt teeth and hair in it. Coke’s total acidity is way higher than any wine.

Acidity:

Acidity plays a major role in the overall profile of a wine because its the mouth-watering factor a wine has, which drives wine’s refreshment factor. You can use these clues to determine if the wine is from a hot or cool climate, and even how long it might age.

Acidity Refers to pH: There are many types of acids in wine, but the overall acidity in wine is often measured in pH. Acidity is how sour a wine tastes. You generally perceive acidity as that mouthwatering, pucker-ing sensation in the back of your jaw. High acid wines are frequently described as “tart” or “zippy”. pH in wine ranges from 2.6, which is punishingly acidic, to about 4.9 which is barely detectable as tart, because it’s much closer to the neutral 7.0 measurement.

• Most wines range between 3 and 4 pH.
• Highly acidic wines are more tart and mouth-watering.
• High acidity can help you determine if a wine is from a cooler climate region or if the wine grapes were picked early.
• Low acid wines tend to taste smoother and creamier, with less mouth-watering qualities.
• Super low acid wines will taste flat or flabby.

Tannin:

Tannin is a red wine characteristic and it can tell us the type of grape, if the wine was aged in oak, and how long the wine could age. You perceive tannin only on your palate and only with red wines; it’s that cotton-ball-like drying sensation.

Tannin comes from 2 places: the skins and seeds of grapes or from oak aging. Every grape variety has a different inherent level of tannin, depending on its individual character. For example, Pinot Noir and Gamay have inherently low-levels of tannin, whereas Nebbiolo and Cabernet have very high levels.

• Grape Tannins Tannin from grape skins and seeds is typically more abrasive and can taste more green.
• Oak Tannins Tannin from oak will often taste more smooth and round. They typically hit your palate in the center of your tongue.

Tasting for oak tannin versus grape tannin is extremely difficult; don’t worry if you don’t get it right away. Here is a detailed article on the topic of tannins.

Alcohol:

Alcohol can sometimes tell us the intensity of a wine and the ripeness of the grapes that went into making the wine.

• Alcohol level can add quite a bit of body and texture to wine.
• Alcohol ranges from 5% ABV – 16% ABV. A sub-11% ABV table wine usually means something with a little natural sweetness. Dry wines at 13.5% to 16% ABV are all going to be quite rich and intensely flavored. Fortified wines are 17-21% ABV.
• Alcohol level is directly correlated to the sweetness of the grapes prior to fermenting the wine. For this reason, lower ABV (sub-11%) wines will often have natural sweetness; their grape sugar wasn’t all turned into booze.
• Warmer growing regions produce riper grapes, which have the potential to make higher alcohol wines.
• Low vs. high alcohol wine Neither style is better than the other, it’s simply a characteristic of wine.

Body:

Body can give us clues to the type of wine, the region in which was grown, and the possible use of oak aging. Body usually is directly related to alcohol, but think of body as how the wine “rests” on your palate. When you swish it around in your mouth, does it feel like skim, 2%, or whole milk? That texture will roughly correspond with, light, medium, and full bodiedness in wine. Usually body will also correspond with alcohol, but various other processes like lees stirring, malolactic fermentation, oak aging, and residual sugar can all give a wine additional body and texture.

TIP: A great example of “finish” from the world outside of wine is the sappy, oily feeling 20 seconds after taking a sip of Coca-Cola.

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Step 4: Conclusion

This is your opportunity to sum up how to taste wine. What was the overall profile of the wine? Fresh fruits with an acid-driven finish? Jammy fruits with oak and a broad, rich texture?

In a scenario when you are blind tasting a wine, you would use this moment to attempt to guess what the wine it is that you’re tasting. Try hosting your own private blind tasting to hone your skills.

By activating our brains when we taste wine, we alter the way we consume. This, my friends, is a very good thing.

We thank Wine Folly for this article and claim no rights to their name or their mark.