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My first attempt at Chambourcin wine.
Due to a recent article in WineMaker Magazine, I decided to contact a local farmer who has chambourcin grapes. A friend of mine (Papabeat in the discussion forum) also wanted to make this type of wine. So, we contacted the farmer and picked up 300lbs of grapes. Our goal is to follow the recipe in WineMaker Magazine relatively close with just a few deviations. We expect to have between 18-20 gallons of wine.

	300 lbs of chambourcin grapes
	20 lbs of concord grapes I had from my vines which had been frozen
	10 lbs of sugar
	20 camden tablets
	20 tsp of yeast nutrient
	3 packages of Lalvin 71B-1122 yeast
	10 tsp pectic enzyme

I'll try to document this as well as I can in case you're interested in attempting this.

September 21, 2004
Picked up 300 lbs of grapes and rented a crusher / destemmer from Dave's Homebrew in Belleville, IL. The potential alcohol was right around 11%, so we added 10 lbs of sugar to get the alcohol content up. We also added 20 crushed camden tablets to kill off any wild yeast on the grapes.

September 22, 2004
I apparently forgot to add yeast nutrient, so I added this today before adding the yeast. I added 3 packages of Lalvin 71B-1122 yeast, 10 tsp pectic enzyme, 20 tsp yeast nutrient and covered again.

September 29, 2004
I checked the specific gravity after pushing down the cap multiple times daily. The specific gravity right at 1.0 or so. I don't remember exactly. Either way, my friend Mike couldn't make it to help press, so I added another 5 lbs of sugar to extend the fermentation process, thereby giving us more alcohol, color and flavor extraction.

October 8, 2004
While I was planning on doing the press live online, my home computer web cam server smoked a hard drive.   I did remember to take photos though.   We originally anticipated 18-20 gallons of wine from 300 lbs of grapes, but since we left the juice on the skin so long, we got a lot more juice extraction than we had anticipated.   We ended up with 35 gallons total of fermented juice (wine).

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