Hey everyone! I need to share a massive milestone because processing 119 KILOS of grapes into 100 liters of active most by hand feels like a huge victory already! 🤯 Remember last November's 60 bottles of Rosé? The one thing I couldn’t show you was how it all started. Now, the missing prequel video is officially in the making. After 5 years of caring for a single grapevine in my garden—watching it grow from a tiny stick to a massive plant covering my yard—it finally gave me a beautiful harvest. Combined with grapes from neighbours and colleagues, the volume was absolutely insane. Yesterday was absolute madness. I spent hours cleaning, destemming (pro-tip: wear gloves, because holding those stems for hours left my fingers burning! 🔥), and stomping the entire batch with clean boots. It filled 4 different vats to prevent a purple CO2 explosion in my kitchen. Right now, it's fermenting at a warm 25-27 degrees. I’m running a cool experiment: 3 big vats are powered by a Burgundy yeast (Fermivin VR5) for a structured red, and the 4th is an experimental batch using Enovini Baya Vita yeast for a lighter, fruitier style. My Polish multimeter showed a starting potential of 6% alcohol, so I added 11.5 kilos of sugar in a warm syrup to guide it to a perfect 14%. The room smells amazing, bubbles are forming, and the green sap is turning deep red. One vat had pre-frozen grapes, and it's already twice as dark because the ice crystals broke the cell walls perfectly! Next Sunday is big press-day with my new 4-liter table press inside the kitchen (pray for my walls!). I cannot wait to turn this journey into an epic YouTube video. Have you ever gone completely overboard with a hobby project? Let me know in the comments! 👇

@Rodney Thompson Has helped me grow my channel at least doubled my subscribers and made my videos worth watching. Can’t say ty enough to you brother.

I want to say thank you to this community specifically. A lot of what got us from a few thousand to 19,000 came out of conversations in here, testing ideas, and people pushing me to be honest about what was actually working instead of what I hoped was working. If you're earlier in your own channel's growth, keep going. It didn't happen all at once for us either. Thank you for being part of this. Where the map ends, the wild begins. Stay Rugged.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee issued its designation for the Okefenokee!! Georgia’s Okefenokee swamp becomes UNESCO World Heritage site. It is where @Rodney Thompson Outdoor Skills lives nearby and creates all his YouTube videos on the topic of Blackwater Journeys. His videos were featured in the case for designation. The Okefenokee is one of our planet’s largest intact freshwater ecosystems. Here is a link to the Washington Post article! https://wapo.st/45mj1DT

Our footage, our name, and our logo ran live on CNN during the breaking news announcement that the Okefenokee is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Half a million people watching nationally. We didn't buy that. We earned it, one trip at a time, on that water. This community has been part of every step of this journey. Thank you all, truly. Where the map ends, the wild begins. Stay rugged.