Apr 05 2010
Make Delicious Homemade Wine - Step by Step Instructions
By Dan Appleman
The biggest secret in home wine making is: get the good stuff to start with. Here are step by step instructions for making fabulous homemade wine.
Table of contents
1. A brief History of Wine
2. Use Grocery Store Fruit?
3. Patience is a virtue
4. Before we get started
6. Gathering the essential ingredients
7. Cleanliness is Next to Godliness
8. What to ferment our homemade wine in
9. Get Started
10. The First Stage
11. Racking
12. The Second Stage
13. Clearing and Waiting
15. Stabilizing
16. Bottling your homemade wine
When grapes grow, there is actually yeast ON the outside of the grapes. If all you do is crush the grapes and keep the juice around 75 degrees, the juice will ferment all by itself.
A brief history of wine
Humans have been making their own “homemade wine” since the beginning of time. References to people drinking wine are throughout the bible. How about that for a long time. However, over the years making wine has become an art form and if you follow these steps exactly you will be able to consistently grind out batches delicious enough to sell.
Use Grocery Store Fruit?
Grapes that are harvested at exactly the correct time are brimming with natural sugar. They are tested electronically while still on the vine to determine the exact peak time of day when the sugar content is the highest. These types of grapes never need sugar added - they already have enough. Grapes that you get at the grocery store are harvested unripe so that they will not go bad during the delivery to the grocery store. You can make wine with store bought grapes but it will not be award winning.
Patience is a virtue
Making GREAT homemade wine takes some time - and by time I mean months -not days or weeks. Also - patience is required during the fermenting process, the racking process, the bottling process, and the ageing process.
Before we get started
You should PLAN what you are going to make. You should PREPARE everything in advance. This way, you will not get caught in the middle of doing something and not have what you need. You should also PLAN where your work area will be. Sure, you could do this in your kitchen, but it is a lot nicer to have a spot staked out that is your “WINEMAKING” area.
Gather essential ingrediants
Before you ever crush the first grape, process the first peach, or open the first can of frozen concentrate, get everything you are going to need. This includes corks, bottles and a corker. It also includes siphon tubing, chemicals, and primary and secondary fermentation
vessels.
Cleanliness is Next to Godliness
We want one kind of microbe to grow - not hundreds. We want our yeast to grow and that is all. We are not trying to have a microbe party and invite everyone. Remember to clean and sanitize everything you will be working with.
What to ferment our homemade wine in
You need a fermentation vessel like a milk jug or a sanitized food grade storage container. The food grade storage container is best and you can get them free by just asking at a restaurant. I do not recommend using the ones they use for pickles.
Get Started
All you need is some kind of fruit juice (or vegetable or spice or pepper or whatever!) that has a sugar content high enough to let yeast feed on it. This is what fermentation is - YEAST eating SUGAR. The byproducts of the yeast consuming the sugar are alcohol and carbon dioxide. Remember - sanitize everything before you begin. The best way to know if you have enough sugar is to follow a good recipe, or, to measure the Specific Gravity. Usually - a specific gravity of about 1.1 will do it.
The First Stage
Once you have the sugar content right and your must sanitized with sulfides, then all you need to do is toss in (pitch) the yeast (some yeasts make very good wine while others, like bakers yeast, do not).
Racking
After about 4 days of no visible bubbling, probably on day 10, it is time to remove the wine from the Primary and put it in a secondary container that is about the same size as the first one. The reason is that you will have a LOT of DEAD YEAST (called lees) on the bottom of the Primary vessel and it can give the wine a bad flavor if it sits on it for days.
The Second Stage
Leave the airlock on for 2 to 4 weeks. At the end of 4 weeks, it is wine. The longer you let it sit in the secondary, the better the wine is going to be, up to a point anyway. The wine sits unexposed to air during this second stage. The little yeast that is still active is still turning sugar to alcohol. Let it do its thing. This prolonged time also lets all of the smaller solids that can make a wine cloudy fall to the bottom.
Stabilizing
This fermentation thing is a microbiological process. Although we cannot see it, we may still have a small amount of fermentation going on in the wine. If we were to just bottle it now, the small amount of carbon dioxide being produced could cause our bottles to explode. We need to do something to STOP the fermentation form taking place
Bottling your homemade wine
I just go to local restaurants and ask them to save me cases of bottles at a time. If you want, there are wine shops that will sell them to you for pretty cheap.
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