How To Make Own Wine

How To Make Wine The Basic Steps To Making Wine

Weve talked about what wine is, how its made, what equipment you will need, and what additives you can add. Now lets talk about the basic process of making wine. Im going to list this as some easy to follow steps.

Harvest Red Wine Grapes

Red wine is made with black wine grapes. In fact, all the color you see in a glass of red wine comes from anthocyanin found in black grape skins.

During the grape harvest, the most important thing to do is to pick the grapes at perfect ripeness. Its critical because grapes dont continue to ripen after theyve been picked.

What’s Next Wait For The Homemade Wine To Ferment

Take your bottle of soon-to-be wine, and store it in a cool dark place . After a couple of hours, check and see if your balloon has inflated. If it hasn’t, you might try gently sloshing the mixture or just continue waiting. If your balloon does look inflated then you’re well on your way to a marvelous batch of wine. Just keep it stored in a cool dark place. Over the next couple of weeks, the wine will bubble, and biochemical reactions will take place.

The wine after a few weeks

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Is It Hard To Make Wine At Home

Making wine at home can sound a bit daunting to the uninitiated, but its no more complicated than making sourdough bread. It will demand more of your time and a few special tools. Creative imagination is also useful, and a good way to start is to do a bit of reading to gain a higher appreciation for professional winemakers.

Easy Mulled Wine Recipe

• 750ml bottle of red wine
• 1 sliced clementine
• 3 black peppercorns
• 50ml brandy

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Alternative Spirits To Try

A delicate drizzle of spiced rum, such as Sailor Jerry, ginger wine and cherry or apricot brandy can also work, but be careful not to go overboard. Avoid anything that might curdle, strongly contrasting spirits or anything cloying while its tempting to match the spices with something aniseedy, sambuca mulled wine would kill the party mood in an instant.

Learn The 5 Steps Of The Wine Making Process

Wine making has been around for thousands of years. In its basic form, wine production is a natural process that requires very little human intervention. Mother Nature provides everything that is needed to make wine it is up to humans to embellish, improve, or totally obliterate what nature has provided, to which anyone with extensive wine tasting experience can attest.

There are five basic stages or steps to making wine: harvesting, crushing and pressing, fermentation, clarification, and then aging and bottling. Undoubtedly, one can find endless deviations and variations along the way. In fact, it is the variants and little deviations at any point in the process that make life interesting. They also make each wine unique and ultimately contribute to the greatness or ignominy of any particular wine. The steps for making white wine and red wine are basically the same, with one exception. The making of rosé wines and fortified or sparkling wines is also another matter both require additional human intervention to succeed. Learn more about wine and what goes into every bottle by reading our wine glossary index.

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What Happens If You Bottle Your Wine Before Its Done Fermenting

You might make little wine bombs! If the wine is still fermenting when you bottle, itll keep producing carbon dioxide, which will eventually build up to a point in the bottle where it needs to escape. When it gets there, the bottle might pop its cork, pop off its flip-topor in the worst case scenario, break the glass of the bottle. You can prevent this by making sure the wine is still and finished fermenting before bottling or by sterilizing the wine with Campden tablets before bottling. I personally like to live on the edge, so I never sterilize my wine , and occasionally, I open up a nice carbonated bottle!

Whats A General Formula For Making Fruit Wine From Any Kind Of Fruit

Making wine is more of an art than a science, which means it takes some experimentation to nail down exactly what works for you and your tastebuds, but as a general rule of thumb, you can use this formula for a one gallon batch of fruit wine:

3 pounds of fresh or frozen fruit + 2-3 pounds of cane sugar + 1 gallon of water + Yeast and desired additives

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How To Get Ahead

Our recipe features instructions on how much of the syrup to add to wine, but if youre adding to your own taste, its a good way of controlling sweetness and spice levels. Itll keep for up to three months, too.

Want to prepare ahead of time? Try our slow cooker mulled wine recipe. The low heat ensures the wine doesnt boil and the flavours stay fresh.

Optional Step : Back Sweetening

When your secondary fermentation is over, its time to taste that wine! In general, fruit wines need time to age before they are really delicious, so dont be too concerned about the flavor profile yet. What you are concerned about right now is sweetness. If you taste the wine and are happy with the sweetness, you can move onto Step #5!

If you taste the wine and its too dry, no worries, we can now rack the wine and back sweeten it. There are multiple ways to do this:

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How To Store And Bottle Homemade Wine The Right Way

Now that you know how to make wine at home, lets talk about how you should store it, a process just as important.

Great taste is all in storage, many wine experts and enthusiasts say. And theyre right. Theres a lot more to the ritual than filling your wine bottles and stashing them away at a dark corner.

Winemakers take great pride in storing their bottles in mint condition, and this process begins with your bottle.

Read Me: An Important Winemaking Caveat

Like most things in life, the craft of home winemaking falls on a wide spectrum. On one end, you have the folks who love to dive all inthey spend hundreds of dollars on special tools, they sanitize everything using synthetic chemicals, they take scientific records, they use very specific winemaking additives. On the other hand, there is what I like to call heritage winemakers. These people use barely nothing more than a clean canning jar, fruit, water, and some sugarafter all, thats the way folks have been making wine for generations. And then there are all of us who fall somewhere in between on the spectrum.

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The Science And Magic Of Wine

a new friend is as a new wine when it is old, thou shalt drink it with pleasure. Ecclesiasticus 9:10

I grew up on tales of my Dad’s 1970s homemade hedgerow wines. Their fruity aroma and potency were legendary. All that remains of this heady era are five very dusty bottles of “vintage” wine sitting in my father’s garage. Of what vintage, or even of what fruit these wines are made, has been long forgotten. But the bottles, and a glut of apples and blackberries, inspired me to start making my own wine. Beautiful jewel-coloured liquids and the constant plop of air locks have formed a backdrop to my living room ever since.

Many microbes are capable of obtaining energy by consuming sugars, and many liberate the alcohol ethanol as a by-product. Unfortunately for the microbes, they are also producing their very own poison. Ethanol will kill most microbes even at low concentrations. Fortunately for us, yeast is different. It can survive in up to about 20% ethanol before it is overcome, and for millennia we have made use of this ability in many fruitful ways.

The truth is that Dad’s “vintage” wines have taken the inevitable final step of fermentation: their alcohol has turned to vinegar. In fact it is vinegar, not wine, that is God’s gift to man all we can do is hold it a little while at the wine stage.

Add Sachet 2 Stabiliser

Add sachet number two or one and a half teaspoons of potassium sorbate and stir with your sterilised stirrer. Some methods say to stir or shake the CO2 out of the wine at this stage, others say you don’t need to do this, particularly if you are planning to allow the wine to mature for some time. CO2 is added to the wine when it is fermented by the yeast. It increases the acidity as it is dissolved as carbonic acid in water. It easily leaves the solution into the air when stirred or shaken. However, if you remove all of it you can end up with a flat tasting wine. I decided to leave mine to stand so the CO2 left left slowly of it’s own volition.

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Instructions: Making Wine The Easy Way

How To Tell When The Grapes Are Ready To Make Wine

The grapes are ready to make your own wine at home when they are ripe, but not too sweet. If they taste bitter they aren’t ready yet. You can go by taste but I tend to check the sugar level by measuring the density using a hydrometer . You want the starting starting specific gravity between 1.070 and 1.100 so the grapes need to be somewhere near this. When you add the sugar the SG will increase. Mine was 1.062. Water has an SG of 1.000 the measurements are relative to this. Sugar is denser than water, alcohol is lighter. This means you can calculate the alcohol content by measuring the density at the beginning, after the addition of sugar, and at the end of fermentation. The density at the end was 0.990. There are various online calculators you can use , I calculated the alcohol content of my wine to be 9.8. I am happy with this as it tastes excellent you can get a higher alcohol content if you want by adding more sugar.

There is a lot written on the internet about how to check when grapes are ready, all of them say something different! I would suggest reading around it and doing what feels right for you.

Wash your hands thoroughly, twice, up to your elbows before handling any of the grapes or equipment which will come into contact with them. Wash them again if you touch anything else door handles/kettle/dog etc.

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Watch The Fermentation Magic

Test the sugar levels of the fermenting juice periodically with a basic hydrometer in a graduated cylinder. Its measured in degrees Brix, which equals sugar percentage. Your juice will start out between 1826 degrees Brix, and it will reduce to minus-2 Brix once fermentation is complete.

White wine fermentation lasts several days to several weeks, and it depends a lot on temperature. The cooler the room, the longer it takes. Red wine that reaches a good, warm temperature during fermentation should be done in a week or two.

Once fermentation is complete, separate the new wine from the gross lees of fermentation. Pour the wine into a five-gallon carboy to mature.

For white wine, use tubing to siphon off the juice and leave most of the lees behind to dump out. Elevate the fermentation container at least two feet above the carboy in which you will age it. Start the flow using your mouth for suction, and gravity will do the rest.

For a red, transfer the juice to a carboy and then press the skins to squeeze out any remaining juice. Add this to the carboy as well, and top it with an airlock.

Back Sweetening Your Homemade Mint Wine

Sometimes – usually, even – youll find that the yeast went a bit too far with their smorgasbord, and you end up with a Mint wine thats not as sweet as youd like it.

… and thats when you back sweeten it! You can read my How to Stabilize and Back Sweeten Wine post for information on how to back sweeten it.

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Add Airlock Top Up With Cold Water

Boil the airlock for a couple of minutes, getting some of the boiling water to run through the lock. Remove with tongs or a spoon, leave a small amount of boiled water in it and stick in the hole in your bucket, leave for 3 hours then top up to 23 litres with cold water.

The instructions with the bucket said to leave the edge of the bucket lid lifted to let the CO2 out instead of using an airlock but I was worried about backflow and contamination so I drilled a hole and added a rubber gasket so I could use an airlock. My friend Mike said that his elferflower brew used to ferment so violently it would blow all the water out of the airlock but I haven’t had this happen with grape wine.

How To Make Vodka At Home

Making vodka at home involves fermenting any foodstuff that contains sugar or starch, and then distilling the product to increase its alcohol content. Today, the majority of vodka is made from fermented grains such as sorghum, corn, rice, rye, or wheat. But you can also use potatoes, fruits, or even just sugar.

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Can Homemade Vodka Get You Drunk

The fermentation process creates a vodka with only about 16% ABV, which is way too low for spirits. But youre going DIY, so that means you can make the extract stronger by putting it back in the distillation setup to minimize alcohol loss. You can perform tweaks and make it on par with commercial vodkas at 40% ABV or stronger.