Distilling Aguardente from Grapes 🍷 Making Wine | PORTUGAL FARM LIFE S3-E39

Hey guys and girls it's Ken here from OK Portugal. Welcome to another episode of Portugal Farm Life. Now we are on our farm here in central Portugal in the Castelo Branco district. It's 27 degrees today, it's the end of summer, it's an absolutely beautiful day as you can probably see around me, and I just wanted to take you for a little walk down into our bottom field. Now we've had a lot of rain over the last couple of days. I think we had three days of rain, thunderstorms, and that was actually the second lot of rain that we've had all summer. So the farm was incredibly dry, but now there's a lot of greenery starting to pop up, and yeah it's really beautiful. Let me show you some of it. So over here you can see there's a bunch of grasses and all sorts of things popping up. It's like little flowers. So things are starting to come back to life from that long dry hot summer. It's really great to see all of this. In our bottom field we have a whole bunch of corn that was planted a couple of months ago, and Joaquin came with his tractor and basically ploughed everything. It was all just dry and dusty and boiling hot, and then he planted these corn seeds and there was no watering, no nothing like that, and they've all just grown. It looks absolutely amazing. Now with the rain that we've recently had there's even corn cobs growing. Generally speaking when you plant corn, unless you irrigate it, it won't actually grow the cobs. But this is growing cobs now because the ground is nice and wet. So look at that. Now if you're new to the channel, the reason why we're growing this corn is to feed Joaquin's sheep, so we aren't growing this in order to make corn cobs or anything like that. But it is quite cool to see because last year we didn't have any corn cobs growing. It's really amazing to see all of this new life coming up when everything was so dry and so arid. Look there's there's a little bit of new life popping up there. That's called a mimo. You're a good girl. So Dog Dog is never very far away from his master, but he always finds himself a nice little shady spot. Over here he's dug into the earth there and given himself a little bit of cool soil to lie in, and he's having a good time. And Gina is whittling away. So I cut all the branches off the bottom of the tree this morning and I thought it was a waste. So I thought I'd give basket weaving a go with olive twigs. I don't think that's bad for my first attempt. I see here that we've missed we've missed a couple of our grapes when we were doing our harvest. Look at these. Wow let's try one of those. That's a good eating grape. So I'm going to go for a little a little stroll through the cornfields. One of the cool things about this corn is over here we've got watermelons growing with them. So that's quite cool. It's like companion planting. I'm not sure if that was done on purpose or if it happened by accident, but it's pretty cool. You can kind of tell where the wet parts of the field are. One of the really tall bits of corn are where there's the most water. We do have a well just back there and so I think the lower that we go here the more water gets drawn in from the well and kind of waters these plants in a way. I enjoy walking through this stuff and so do the dogs. In a hot summer it's amazing to have like a big green field like this with no irrigation. And here's another perspective on this big field. How cool is that? So in a couple of days the sheep will be on here and munching away and it won't take them long. And this must be the driest part of the field. You can see it's very low here only about one to two foot high and then towards the end there it starts to get really tall again. So it's pretty cool. You can actually see where where all the water sort of flows through the field just by watching how the plants grow. Now here you can start to see they're almost getting as tall as me. In fact as I walk forward now there are a couple that are almost the same height as me. How cool is this? I love it. The dogs love it in here. It's like little tunnels for them to run through. They get all the scent trails of all the little animals and things. One of the other animals that enjoy corn are wild pigs. You can see here some hoof prints of wild pigs. They come marching up the sides here along the fence lines and they love the corn so they're going to be very well fed. I don't actually see any damage so there aren't any. Usually you see big flattened areas so the wild pigs are coming here but I don't see them munching away so they're not causing us a problem. But here you can see all the little tracks of the wild piggies as they come running up mixed in with some of our dogs prints and every time you walk here with the dogs the dogs are very interested in sniffing these. So Gina's been quite busy. She's cut all of these little branches off and the reasoning for that is you don't really want the tree putting energy into growing shoots out here. You want it to put its energy into making olives. But also with all the branches sticking out when you actually do come to pick the olives the nets are going to get stuck and ripped and torn in them so she's just cutting these all back and yeah she's all the way in the back there. She's trying to figure out how to sow baskets. Sorry not sow baskets, weave baskets. So what was once dry soil is now all wet from those rains and look at all these grasses popping up. Soon we're going to have a whole bunch of green fields. I cannot wait. It's been a really long dry hot summer. I've had a few comments of people saying oh you've you've destroyed your fields you've killed them you know because they've seen what a field looks like when you plow it and they just take that as you know the field's dead. But I don't think they realize that there's so many seeds and there's so much life in this ground that a little bit of water a little bit of sun and everything sort of springs back again. So it won't be long. I do hope that the people that said that this field behind me here was dead are looking at it now. We've got a whole bunch of these here which last year I found out are called datura, moonflower or devil's trumpet. They're highly poisonous. You've got tons of them. Look at that just growing all the way along here. They've got these weird spiky seed pods and every part of it I believe is very very toxic. You do not want to eat this stuff. It'll put you in hospital. It also has some kind of hallucinogenic effect as well. It's contained something called DMT but I think people have hurt themselves trying to get DMT out of it and actually some people have killed themselves. So it's not a good idea but I think the sheep are going to eat it. So maybe I should see if any of the sheep are acting a bit odd. Maybe someone can tell me what these are. Are these phyllis or gooseberry? I'm not sure. These just are popping up all over the farm. I think it's some kind of edible berry inside there but I'm not sure. Some things look similar. Obviously I'm not going to eat it without knowing what it is but maybe someone can tell us in the comments. So Gina has made a basket, a little basket of leaves. Well apparently olive leaf tea is supposed to be very medicinal so I'm going to give it a go. I think it's going to be very bitter so I might have to look up a recipe to make it less bitter. So from the from the twigs and the leaves. Oh I didn't quite know how to make a handle though. Sweet. Yeah anyway it's tea time. Tea time. Real tea. Yeah. Not olive leaf tea. So it's only 34.4 degrees in so it's just warm enough to have a cup of tea. It's never too warm to have tea. Now Gina's got this little thermometer on the side there. 34.4. Wow. Yeah it's warm in here but what I'm really doing is I'm in here having a look at our Patreon site and if you don't know Patreon is a site where our fans can support us of things going on in the farm. If you want to have a look at our page you can have a look at it by going to patreon.com forward slash OK Portugal and then we have lots of posts you can select different levels of membership if you want to support us and that helps us just do little things around the farm extra treats for the animals. And big things around the farm. And big things around the farm. Things like camera gear and memory cards. And it's just a way of people supporting us for the videos because obviously the videos are free and we put them online for free but they actually take a lot of work to go up so this is a really nice way of people showing. But we also but we also give stuff back so for instance on these different levels we do things like you've got early access to videos where you don't have to watch adverts on the videos you get to watch them before everyone else you get discounts on our merchandise you get stickers sent to you after you've been a member for a certain amount of time but what we've decided to do is well what Gina's decided to do is give out a whole bunch of stickers yeah for a limited time only for the first I don't know maybe 30 let's do 30 yeah 30 fans then what we're gonna do is we're gonna send you out a sticker pack no matter what level you join up so we're gonna one of these stickers which is that's a really nice normal sticker but it's an easy peel so if you stick it in the wrong place you can change it yeah don't stick it in the wrong place don't stick it in the wrong place and then this which is my favorite this is a fridge magnet and so it sticks onto anything metal yeah we've got one on the back of our car and on the fridge and on a metal door yeah i haven't got rid of yet so they're all over the place these are handy and then these ones which are lovely little ones which have got all the animals on so you've got Mecco, Dog Dog, Mimosa and Nanook on there and that's a little die cut the original one was slightly bigger but we took Nando's off because Nando's no longer with us and we changed a little bit of stuff yeah and then this is on my phone case so that makes it easier but i like this one and they come in little envelopes so if you do decide to join us on Patreon then you can expect one of these to come dropping on your yes your format as of now there's only 14 places left to get the free sticker pack yes um but um i can't remember which tier level it is after being for a month is it or three months you get sent a free sticker but you won't get the whole pack so you know even if you join after all 14 you know after all 30 slots are taken you will still get a sticker yes oh yeah well you'll still get what's said on there it's just a like a limited time only that it's the full sticker pack so you'll you'll be getting the okay portugal sticker which can go anywhere like on your camper van or wherever you want to put it um but for now we're going to give like the extra pieces and we also just have to figure out how to sell these in our etsy store but yeah we're gonna it's going to take us a couple of weeks to sort that out yeah or we might do like a pre-order maybe i don't know we haven't maybe you can give us some ideas in the comments below yeah let us know who wants fridge magnets stickers etc and we'll sort something out or you can just join patreon and then you'll get them anyway exactly yeah or you could join patreon make us super happy and uh and get the stickers we've just had lunch and now we're on our way to our neighbor's farm uh the last video that we put up so if you haven't seen it go and check it out this was to do with our wine harvest our grape harvest and so we were making some wine with our neighbors or at least we were starting the process now i believe they're doing a little bit more of that process now and i think they're going to be making something today called aguardente which is distilling some of it into a pure spirit so come along with us and check it out so i'm just at our neighbor's house and i'm with uh costa say hello to youtube and uh we are well costa is in the process of distilling some wine into something called aguardente aguardente is like a pure spirit so yes yes okay oh wow okay okay so this over here this is aguardente so you can see that this is like a pure sort of spirit and it's like my spirit i've got a pure spirit as well it's got like a almost like a raisin type taste so it's like raisins raisins and vodka almost um wow it's like fire it's strong it's some good stuff so i need to find out now exactly how it's um well exactly how it's made so i think gina if you just show out here quickly um i think this is where where it comes from see yeah whoa wow look it's still burning amazing this is incredible so if you watched last week's video you'll remember that this is the part where we macerated all of the grapes we put them inside here and they've sat for about two weeks and they've basically been sitting uh they've been fermenting and so what they're doing is they're draining out all of the all of the wine pretty much um and as you can see that's that's all coming out here landing inside the bucket and then after that they strain it and they pour it into these 50 liter tubs so we've got a whole bunch of them i think there's seven of them four five six seven and this will be the eighth that's quite a few of them and uh yeah and then basically this stuff all of this wet pulp this is what goes inside the alambic and that's what they turn into aguadente so i think i know what's going on now um they're basically taking this which is all of the grapes now these are the grapes that were last week you saw they got macerated and they were sitting inside a big tub and they were left for about two weeks inside that tub and uh thank you rooster and they start to ferment and they've obviously drained off all of the alcohol or sorry they've drained off all of the wine now that's gone into barrels and then we left with this stuff here which is kind of like the pulp like the grapes and then that gets taken and put inside the alambic on this side it's going to go through so this alambic which is this big pot i think they probably lift off the top here put all of the grapes inside okay and you can see the bottom of this pot here is is just above the fire and that heats everything up so as it heats it up it creates like vapor like water vapor of the alcohol and that water vapor goes up through this tube through cold water and and then it comes out the bottom here you can see there's a whole bunch of it just dripping in here and that is aguardente so it's got a flavor of like raisin and a very strong percentage of alcohol and you can see here it's filling this all up quite quickly and this over here is already um 5.4 liters incredible so this is really fascinating me look how that's dripping now he's had it running for the last uh four hours he said and he's got 10 liters so there's five liters in this one and they've got another tab somewhere 10 liters in four hours i mean that is pretty amazing and they've got a lot more of um you know these grapes and everything that are fermented so i'm not sure how much how much they're going to get but i think they're going to get quite a lot of the stuff so costa was just telling me now that if you make the fire too too strong then basically what happens is you get too much uh water vapor coming through and you get too much flow and if the flow is too strong then the quality isn't quite there it hasn't distilled properly and so you need to balance the fire the fire needs to be um it needs to be calm and not too strong thank you for showing us uh how you distill that was really interesting ciao that was really awesome of costa to show us exactly how they um like distill all of that aguardente stuff you know last year we missed out on watching all of that because you know we had our lockdowns and everything happening so well it's been really cool to see it for the first time uh but this is where we're going to have to love you and leave you we've had a lot of stuff going on this week my mom's arrived from south africa and she's at the moment quarantining on our farm and our spare accommodation on the farm so we've had a whole bunch of property videos on the go and uh yeah thanks to john and deb for hiring us to make that video for them yesterday um but yeah we're going to keep this one short and sweet tune in next week same time for another episode of portugal farm life and uh gina was just saying rather short and sweet than long and boring so anyway ciao everyone ciao for now