Grapes

Although this is totally unrelated to my textbook, I made grape juice. I actually don't like it, but all the adults I've given it to like it. Maybe grape juice is an acquired taste.

So my sister Kate and I went to pick grapes at our relatives house. I think they are my dad's mom's cousins but I'm not sure, my dad's side of the family is really complicated because everyone has a gazillion kids. So one set of cousins could range from my grandmother's age to newborn and then they all have cousins. Like I said, it gets really complicated. So we just call them our long-lost relatives and leave it at that.

Anyways, Mom and Dad were laying stone, so they sent Kate and I to pick grapes at the long-lost relatives. When we got there, everyone was already picking grapes. It isn't that hard; just use heavy duty kitchen shears and cut off the bunches of grapes that grow on the vine. So Kate and I jumped in and started picking grapes. [|Chardonay grapes]. Which according to Scott (the wine guy who takes the grapes and makes them into wine) make really good grape juice. He told us to just smush the grapes up and filter them through cheesecloth and add asorbic acid to keep the juice from getting too brown. So when Kate and I were done picking, we took two bunches of chardonay grapes with us to make grape juice. Then we went to CVS to buy some Vitamin C tablets (which are basically asorbic acid with some other stuff.) When we got home, Kate mashed the vitamin C pills (which was her favorite part. She LOVES our [|mortar and pestle].) Then I washed the grapes, pulled them off the stems, and smushed them with a potato masher. But we were out of cheesecloth, so I just filtered the juice through a coffee filter. Which actually took a lot longer than I thought. But finally, the juice finished filtering through and I added the crushed up vitamin C pill.

And after all that, I tasted the grape juice and didn't like it.

Let me just say that chardonay grape juice is really, really sweet and I never liked grape juice to start with. But it was still a fun experience.


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