Grappa - My first fruit wash

[decomissioned]

Having an abundance of free grape skins I decided my first non-sugar wash would be a grappa run. I picked up a Gott cooler full of some white wine variety skins that had just been pressed. The skins smelled musty, but still fresh. Here was my procedure:

Loosely fill an 8 gallon fermenter full of skins.
Invert 8 lbs of cane sugar in 2 gallons of water. I think I might have used too much sugar.. i think it should have been closer to 4-5 lbs. [Comments?]
Add 2 gallons of ice water to give 4 gallons of slightly warm (85-90F) water.
Poured this over the grape skins in the fermenter to fill.
No yeast was added.
Covered and airlocked.

The first week the airlock went nuts. You could hear it downstairs across the house. I eventually had to put the fermenter on top of a few towels to insulate the sound so I could sleep. The next week it slowed down. Once it was burping once every 10 seconds I racked off the secant wine and tossed the skins into the compost. I let the wine continue on its own for another few days. It kept on fermenting, burping every 15-20 seconds. At the two week total ferment time mark I racked into the still and ran it real slow in my Mile Hi Mighty Mini 3 gallon. My 4 gallons of water gave me about 2.8 gallons of clearish wash so I just ran the one batch. I ran it pretty slow, about 700 watt without any packing in the column and the jacket cooler turned off completely for the entire run.

I was expecting to pull off 65% ABV or so to start, but it was upwards of 70% and stayed there for quite a while. My column is uninsulated so maybe I was getting some unintended reflux? I collected 8 mostly full half-pint jars at above 40% abv. I kept capturing down to 20% for the feints jar, and got another 3 mostly full jars. Just went and checked my jars and most of them are only about 3/4 full.. so that would mean I have around 1.8 liters. Seems high for a 3 gallon still. Then again, this is everything that came out of the still minus fores. Heads, hearts, tails... Does that sound right?

In the next day or two I'll do my blending. So far though, I can tell you hands down this is the best run I've had to date. Granted I'm still a newbie, but this run has me excited all over again!

If the Legends of the craft would care to critique my process I will accept all comments graciously. I checked my ego at the front door and just want to get better.