[wayfarer]

has anyone made grape juice using a press?  I have a bladder press we use for juicing apples and want to use that in the hope that it will be less labour intensive than steaming.  Do you need to break open the grapes before using the press and do you need to strain or do any other processing of the resulting juice before bottling it and then pasteurising it?

[cloddopper]

Got my grape juice for my wine  using my sterile hands to break the grapes  once they had had a 2 minute sulphite soak to sterilise them .
 Left them c/w any stems in their juices for three days ,   poured off the juice into a sterile  container then crushed a hand full of what was left at a time to ensure almost  total juice extraction .  Out of the 20 litre stainless steel  bucket of black grapes I had 480 grams of waste .

 So pre crush but don't crush the seeds , steep in their own  juice in a covered container for three days and then  put the grapes through your press to get maximum juice but don't crush the seeds for it makes the juice bitter .