Boy, did I mess up that time estimate… I figured I’d be able to get the prep-work done for the cherry wine in about an hour, hour and a half tops. With two of us working for the last half of it, it took almost three hours to de-pit two and a half gallons of tart cherries.
We started work on it at about 5 and just finished up around 8. My fingernails have taken on a really peculiar frosted texture from the acidic fruit juice. We’ll see if that changes after an hour or two. We’d still be working on it if they’d had stems, or if the first gallon that Scott gave us hadn’t been pre-pitted.
And I did find a recipe in the Home Winemakers Companion. It calls for 15 lbs of cherries, which is just half a pound shy of what we wound up with. I figure it’s good enough, especially since the recipe is for sweet cherry wine instead of tart cherry. We should be pretty safe leaving out the acid blend…