I don’t know if you’ve watched old films with vine harvests and wine juice making or wine making but they always seem to contain plucky villagers without shoes stepping on the grapes. That’s all very well and dandy but apparently it hardly ever happens any more.

The team in Atalanti, Greece, went about finding out what actually does happen nowadays to get wine juice. This is effectively the process before one starts wine making. A lot of people in Greece with their own grapes will just take them to a patitiri (the place where the grapes are literally ‘stepped on’) to get wine juice. They then take the wine juice and make their own wine at home.

We made a little video in Greek (see below) but here are the pics too.

Giorgos with my step-sister Elina who helped out with the harvest (and obviously the Digital Scullery pics and video) this year.

Grapes ready to transfer.

The grapes waiting at the patitiri to be put through the process.

Vassilis puts the grapes in this nifty little machine. It separates the grapes from the stalks and slightly crushes them.

The leftovers.

The lightly crushed grapes are sucked and transferred to another machine.

This machine has a giant wheel that crushes the grapes further. The juice accumulates in this drawer below.

Here is Vassilis filling a vat with red juice (I bet loads of people would like to stick their mouth there eh?) 🙂

From then on people either just grab the juice to make their own wine (or use in all sorts of recipes) or the juice is used in wine making at the patitiri.

Who knew?