Just Something I Made brings you just something he made. Today Jeff and I labeled his red wine vinegar and he finished wax sealing the last of his bottles of 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon, all in time to share on Christmas day. I thought you would enjoy seeing a bit of the process of one of Jeff’s favorite hobbies, winemaking.
He begins by purchasing and handpicking all of the grapes from a Sonoma vineyard, such as these picked early last month.
I adore those vintage wooden crates, much heavier than the new plastic bins available, but these have been in his family for many years.
He pours all of the grapes into the crusher then cranks by hand to separate the fruit from the stem.
The separated stems fall into a wheelbarrow and are pushed to the back of our property into the compost pile for our garden.
Our pups not only accompany him in the vineyards when picking, but keep him company during the crush.
The grapes and seeds pile into a large vat.
Yeast is added to the grapes and the vat is stored in our barn and kept covered and nice and warm with heating blankets wrapped around the outside of the vat while the grapes ferment over a couple of weeks. Each member of our family helps keep the electric blankets heated and the grapes stirred while the winemaker is on duty at the firehouse. 
After the fermentation process the grapes are pressed and all the liquid is poured into large carboys (huge glass jugs). The liquid is later racked (siphoned from one carboy to another leaving sediment behind.) Left alone for a few months it is again racked into an oak barrel where it will undergo a malolactic fermentation and aged for over a year before bottling. I wasn’t around for photographing the bottling of the 2009 vintage below, I’ll try to snag some shots next time.
I designed the faux leather labels and printed them out onto full sheet label stock. Here is a previous post about his wine and labels on my old design blog. Jeff trimmed out the front and back labels on the Genesis Paper Trimmer (we love that thing!), rounded the corners with a corner punch and adhered them to the bottles. 
Today he warmed up the gold sealing wax over the stove in a small can,
and dipped each of the corked bottles to seal.
Jeff also makes vinegar using extra red wine from the crush which he stores in crocks and later bottles for gift giving. This year he came home with screw-top bottles and cork lids for the vinegar.
I wasn’t crazy about the threads on the neck of the bottle showing so I devised a quick fix using scrap leather.
I washed the leather well with soap and water and cut into strips to fit around the bottles while wet. I trimmed the ends of the strips at angles and cut small nicks at one end.
Folding over the opposite end section, I cut a slit into the leather fold.
I slid the other end into the slit,
slipped it over the bottle,
and pulled tight lodging the cut nicks into the slit. The leather shrunk a bit as it dried hiding the glass threads beautifully.
The vinegar labels were also printed to full sheet label stock and trimmed out individually.
As with the wine labels, each vinegar label edge was colored with a same color marker. This is a very important step in keeping the label appearing as a leather patch rather than a plain paper label with the white edge showing.
All the bottles were labeled side by side to keep the labels at the same height on each.
My dear friend Gia stopped by with Christmas cookies and took the first bottle of vinegar home. We will be handing out the rest of the vinegar and wine to friends and family we visit on Christmas day.
Wow!! I’m so impressed. I’m ready to come tour your vineyard!
What a neat thing! Thanks for showing us the process. It would be a dream of mine to be able to do something like this one day. MERRY CHRISTMAS to you and yours!! May God bring you much joy and peace in celebrating His birth!
Thanks for sharing – this was an interesting and refreshing read. I would love to try some of that wine or even the vinegar.
Cathe and Jeff, this is so wonderful and the story and history is very nice to read. Thank you for sharing and Merry Christmas!
Wow a talented family!!! I would someday love to made red wine since my husband and I love a good bottle of wine! Thanks for sharing Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your family!
THIS IS SO NEAT! The process seems to be a meticulous but beautiful process.
Merry Christmas!
You are like the coolest person I know. I mean seriously, we make wine, but when I read about Jeff’s process I’m so impressed, your label is amazing and that wax seal……AWESOME. Might have to borrow that one….. Be sure to save a bottle for us, and that vinegar too!!! Wishing you and your lovely family the many blessings of the season. Cheers!
And Merry Christmas,
Kate
That was very interesting to read. The Holden family is incredibly talented, Wish you were stopping here with a bottle of the vinegar or wine!
What a wonderful post. Thanks for sharing the wine making process. Your labels are beautiful, as are the leather wraps for the necks of the vinegar bottles.
Loulou Downtown
Too bad I’m not on your gift list! These look amazing. I kept looking for where I could buy a bottle. Let us know if they ever are for sale please!
Hi Cathe!! I had no idea that Jeff made wine.. I’ve been making beer for the past year and a half or so. I’ve actually been thinking about trying to make wine. Your lables are beautiful, We’ve been actually trying to come up with a lable for our beer, but I want to taste Jeff’s wine. I’ll stop by next time I’m in the neighborhood and we’ll swap some beer for some wine!! Hope you are all well!! Say hi to the kids for us and Merry Christmas!!!
Beautiful!
I make hard apple cider and cider vinegar from Ohio fruit. It’s a lot more difficult to find good grapes here!
You are one talented family!!!
What great talent and fun for your family. Of course the bottling and labels are fantastic! Enjoy in the gift giving to others, which I’m sure will be delightful for the recievers of such devine delight. Wishing you and your family a wonderful holiday season and a happy and healthy new year.
God Bless you all!
Wow looks great!
Love this post – I love seeing the process of how something is made – thanks for sharing!
very interesting…you must make many people happy over the holidays. Love the labels! Thank you for sharing with us. Have a very Merry Christmas!
Just wanted to thank you for each and every post you make. For it is a delight to each of us who read them. Merry Christmas
my uncle makes wine (and ice wine and champagne) up in upstate NY so I know how labor intensive it is….great labels and yes, inking is important!!!
Thanks for sharing the wine making process with us. Love the labels and how you made the leather “belts”. We have a lot of those old wooden boxes here on our ranch, used for picking apples.
Happy Holidays to you and your family!
So you are not the only creative one in the family. The wine looks wonderful. Mmmmmm.
so cool to read about the process and the CARE that goes into it!! Every detail: exquisite! Your blog entertains me immensely, Cathe….thanks for the gift(s) you give to all of us by sharing SO MUCH!
Happy Holidays,
Maggie
Wow!! Your husbands wine looks amazing! I love the details; label, wax seal and leather wraps on the vinegar. It is a truly beautiful gift! Hope you and your family had a Merry Christmas.
Wow. What beautiful finishing you did. It’s so nice that you two were able to collaborate to make such a nice gift for family and friends. As usual, your craftiness blows me away.
Hi colleagues, how is everything, and what you want to say
on the topic of this article, in my view its genuinely remarkable for me.