Making a full barrel of wine for first time.

[Sangiovese]

Although we have made wine at home several times before, using grapes, apples, blackberries and raspberries, this fall we have decided to TRY to help my wife's 94 year old father duplicate the wine he used to make "back in the day". He is Italian and loved his wine.
All he really recalls is that he used "8 or 9 boxes" of muscats and "3 or 4 boxes of a black grape that was kind of pricey". I think the black grape may have been Sangiovese, hence the user name.
We are assuming that the "boxes" contained about 40 lbs. each. They were made of wood and were approximately 24 x 16 x 8 inches.
We have his original crusher and screw press, plus the pans and strainers he used.
We plan to crush a total (both colors) of about 500# of grapes directly into two 59 gallon used oak barrels. After this "works" for 3-4 days, we will drain out the liquid, press the solids and, hopefully, wind up with a third oak barrel full of new wine plus 8 to 10 gallons extra to "top off" through the bung hole as evaporation occurs. We will use an air lock on the bung and look to bottle wine late next spring.
ANY good faith comments or suggestions or "DON"T DO THAT"'s will be greatly appreciated.
We recently drank "Dad's" last bottle of homemade wine from 1997 and it was very good---it had aged well.
Hope this isn't too long or elementary for this board.
Thanks.

 

[Honda88]

I would open ferment on the skins in a drum or large bucket for a few days and then rack the wine into the barrels for aging, This is how people did it before stainless steel fermenters and there are folks that still do this today...From the way you word it, It appears that you are going to rely on the natural yeast to ferment the wine since I didn't see anything about adding yeast to the crush. I would not do this but if your wife's father seems to think it will work and it has worked before I would go for it. Too me, Primary fermenting in an oak barrel would be a waste of Oak, I would use something else to primary and then transfer into the oak for aging unless you are getting the barrels really cheap then I suppose it doesn't matter.

 

[DoctorCAD]

I agree with Honda88 about not wasting the oak during fermentation, save that for aging. If grandpa lived in an area that made wine, then he could easily rely on yeast in the environment for his wine, but you probably should not. No telling what is floating around in the air currently.