While on summer vacation, I wanted to brew some wine from scratch rather than from a kit. I asked my brother to build a cider press based on a design in ReadyMade magazine which is reproduced below:

Before you can press apples, you need to shred them up first so that it is easier and more efficient to extract the juice from the apples. We tried using some manual and electric food choppers but they were too slow. In the end we attached a paint mixing head to a drill and plunged it into a 25 liter bucket of apples .

Using this paint mixing head, we were able to shred the apples and form them into "cheeses". At the end of the day, we pressed about 12 liters of apple cider from the equivalent of a 60 liter bucket of apples.

We added 11 liters of water to the cider, 2 five pound bags of sugar, and some yeast. It is now bubbling away. I will hopefully have some decent apple wine in about 4 weeks.

The apples used for this batch were taken from two trees with apples that passed our taste test, which were becoming ripe, and looked healthy. None of the apples were sprayed or treated so the wine will be "organic" as far as I am concerned.

I'm not sure I will have much time to press any more fruit this year. Perhaps the results of my apple wine experiment in the coming weeks will provide the needed motivation (i.e., if the fermentation and clearing stages are successful).

Having a fruit press makes you think more about the native and local fruits that you might take advantage of. It also makes you think about growing fruit in a more purposeful manner. In Strange Fruit George Monbiot wrote an interesting passage about the pleasures of growing fruit:

When you start growing fruit, you enter a world of recondite knowledge, accumulated over centuries of amateur experiments. You must choose the right rootstocks and pollinators and learn about bees, birds and caterpillars. But above all you must learn patience. Growing fruit forces you to think ahead, to imagine a sweeter future and then to wait. Perhaps it is this, as much as the forgotten flavours, that I have been missing.