Hello folks of the Porch,
I've noticed that a few of us have vineyards and that some of you use traditional knifes to help you with the work. It's currently the time of wine harvests, so I thought I'd make a thread about it. Please share some of your impressions, how do you do stuff, what sort of wine you make and most importantly, what knives you use in the process.
We had the first part of our wine harvest today. I'm from eastern Slovenia, the central area of Lower Styria. Most people around here have a vineyard somewhere, ours is right beneath our house. It's on the smaller side, some 400 vines (it used to be cca 1000 more than 20 years ago). Today we harvested only the white grapes because the red ones aren't ripe enough yet. We make mostly half dry white wine named after our village, it's a blend of different grape sorts like yellow muscat, welschriesling, Portugais rouge etc. It's usually less than 1000 liters (depending on the year). We're no serious wine producers, it's my dad's hobby and you can't do much beside this on our steap hillside anyway ...
Most of you probably haven't heard of Slovene wine before. It's worth noting that wine making was already practised here in pre-Roman times and before the French (or Gauls rather) knew what grapes were.
If you ever come across some go ahead and try it. It's because of being virtually unknown to the outside world that you can get good wine for peanuts (the non-knife variety 
).
Ok, so now, finally, here's some short impressions from today. I only snached a few bad photos because I'm sort of the young "buck" of the family, so I had the privilege to carry all the grapes uphill to the cellar. In accordance to this I had a Buck 301 in my pocket. You learn to apreciate a tough stainless knife on a hot, sweaty and foremost incredibly sticky day like this. It came handy a couple of times.
Otherwise we use shears to cut off the grapes from the vines.
Here's a bad view of our small vineyard.
The grapes are then put in buckets and those are carried to the cellar where we put them through a mill (idk if that's the right word in English) to pop the grapes' skin as you can't press them otherwise. My grandpa made this mill and it's older than me. He helped some today as well, as best as his legs and back allowed. The mill separates the single grapes from the stalks.
A look inside the tub where the good stuff is ...
From there the ground grapes are put in the press. Ours isn't particularry big, you yank the handle on the right to increase the preassure (goes to 250 bar).
From the bucket we then pump the pressed juice to stainless cisterns. They're easier to clean and make handling easier in the first days when you have to remove the content to get rid of the nasty stuff. Plus we don't age our wine (most people around here don't), so there's no real need for wooden barrels.
All this nasty goo is removed in further processes and by St Martin's Day on November 11th you usually already have cristal clear wine. St Martin makes grape juice into wine (it's a phrase that rhymes in Slovene ...).
Because we had to harvest some of the yellow muscat grapes earlier already, I can also show you the next step to some degree - fermentation. You put such "things" (dunno what to call this) that are partially filled with water on the lid of the cistern and put a small weight on top of it (in this case a stone). This allows the CO2 from the fermentation to exit the cistern but keeps air from coming in.
This is all I got. Please let's see some pictures of yours too, especially if you have any special knives dedicaded to work in the vineyard - and I know some of you do!
Cheers,
Žan
I've noticed that a few of us have vineyards and that some of you use traditional knifes to help you with the work. It's currently the time of wine harvests, so I thought I'd make a thread about it. Please share some of your impressions, how do you do stuff, what sort of wine you make and most importantly, what knives you use in the process.
We had the first part of our wine harvest today. I'm from eastern Slovenia, the central area of Lower Styria. Most people around here have a vineyard somewhere, ours is right beneath our house. It's on the smaller side, some 400 vines (it used to be cca 1000 more than 20 years ago). Today we harvested only the white grapes because the red ones aren't ripe enough yet. We make mostly half dry white wine named after our village, it's a blend of different grape sorts like yellow muscat, welschriesling, Portugais rouge etc. It's usually less than 1000 liters (depending on the year). We're no serious wine producers, it's my dad's hobby and you can't do much beside this on our steap hillside anyway ...
Most of you probably haven't heard of Slovene wine before. It's worth noting that wine making was already practised here in pre-Roman times and before the French (or Gauls rather) knew what grapes were.
If you ever come across some go ahead and try it. It's because of being virtually unknown to the outside world that you can get good wine for peanuts (the non-knife variety ). Ok, so now, finally, here's some short impressions from today. I only snached a few bad photos because I'm sort of the young "buck" of the family, so I had the privilege to carry all the grapes uphill to the cellar. In accordance to this I had a Buck 301 in my pocket. You learn to apreciate a tough stainless knife on a hot, sweaty and foremost incredibly sticky day like this. It came handy a couple of times.
Otherwise we use shears to cut off the grapes from the vines.
Here's a bad view of our small vineyard.
The grapes are then put in buckets and those are carried to the cellar where we put them through a mill (idk if that's the right word in English) to pop the grapes' skin as you can't press them otherwise. My grandpa made this mill and it's older than me. He helped some today as well, as best as his legs and back allowed. The mill separates the single grapes from the stalks.
A look inside the tub where the good stuff is ...
From there the ground grapes are put in the press. Ours isn't particularry big, you yank the handle on the right to increase the preassure (goes to 250 bar).
From the bucket we then pump the pressed juice to stainless cisterns. They're easier to clean and make handling easier in the first days when you have to remove the content to get rid of the nasty stuff. Plus we don't age our wine (most people around here don't), so there's no real need for wooden barrels.
All this nasty goo is removed in further processes and by St Martin's Day on November 11th you usually already have cristal clear wine. St Martin makes grape juice into wine (it's a phrase that rhymes in Slovene ...).
Because we had to harvest some of the yellow muscat grapes earlier already, I can also show you the next step to some degree - fermentation. You put such "things" (dunno what to call this) that are partially filled with water on the lid of the cistern and put a small weight on top of it (in this case a stone). This allows the CO2 from the fermentation to exit the cistern but keeps air from coming in.
This is all I got. Please let's see some pictures of yours too, especially if you have any special knives dedicaded to work in the vineyard - and I know some of you do!
Cheers,
Žan
Some of the ones we plant don't make it either, if that makes you feel any better. 
The Sancerre looks good too. I'm actually not a big wine guy and lightyears away from anything like a sommelier. 
I guess that's the reason people here preffer shears with locks to knives although back in the day I'm sure they'd use something similar to Charlie's examples as peasent knives in Slovenia were similar to those of neighbouring Italy and Hungary.