Julie W is a fellow blogger and all around neat lady. She also makes fantastic wine, which as we all know is like being able to control the stars. It's just that awesome. Julie was kind enough to share step-by-step instructions! I'm ready to make (drink) my first batch.
Definitely check out her
blog! Thanks Julie!
From Julie W - How to Make Wine
I am flattered and honored that Amanda Z. has asked me to guest post on her blog about my adventures in wine making at home.
I jokingly tell people that it’s in my DNA, since I am a fourth generation wine maker. I have many childhood memories of my dad making wine from every- and anything he could get his hands on, except grapes. My grandfather also made wine (I want to say it was a fig wine that knocked him on his butt, ha ha), and his father, who came over from Sicily went back to Sicily and started a winery. With all that history, how can I go wrong, right?
Seriously, though, making wine at home isn’t rocket science, but it IS science. It’s just disguised as fun and alcohol. There’s a little math involved, as well as chemistry, and if you are anything like me, you’ll want to keep a calculator handy, as well as a notebook to jot down your notes and what you did during the process so that you will know what you did right (and maybe not so right) and refer back to it the next time you make a batch.
My husband and I planted a couple of muscadine grapevines in the back yard last spring; one white and one black, and last fall planted three noble vines. We are lucky in that we are friendly with the owner of the nursery around the corner and were gifted with enough grapes last fall to be able to make two five-gallon batches of red.
As I mentioned above, you can make wine out of just about anything. My kid sister and I spent an afternoon picking yellow dandelion flowers at a local park when we were little. We filled a couple paper grocery bags and Dad made wine. He also did apricot, peach, apple, and even wheat one year, though that didn't turn out too well, LOL.
Of course, there are items that you are going to need to have as the basics to make wine, but you can go as low-brow as you want, or as expensive as you like. We received a wine-making kit from my dad for my birthday last summer and it came with all the basics and then some, which was nice, but there are items in the kit that we have yet to use, and I just racked our third batch of wine yesterday, after having bottled the first batch before Christmas.
For the basics you will need the following items:
A bucket, size appropriate for the amount of wine you are going to make, with a lid (we found that a three gallon food-grade bucket picked up at the farm supply store worked beautifully for our 2 gallon batch of mead);
A strainer bag if you are going to be using fruit, pulp and/or skins in your wine;
A long handled spoon, preferably plastic;
A hydrometer;
An acid test kit;
A graduated cylinder (this could be called optional by many, but I found it so much easier to take specific gravity readings in a cylinder);
Something to sterilize your equipment. We use a no-rinse sterilizer powder that we dilute in warm water;
A (preferably glass) container as a secondary fermenter. This can be as small as a gallon or as big as you like;
An air lock;
An appropriately sized bung (stop laughing, this is just a rubber cork with a hole down the center for your airlock to fit into, which, I suppose, could be referred to as the, uhhhh, bung hole);
Rubber tubing for siphoning into test cylinder, secondary fermenter, bottles;
Wine bottles (figure about five 750 ml bottles for each gallon of wine) or you can simply use whatever screw top bottles you have on hand – just be sure to sterilize them before you use them;
Corks if you aren’t using screw tops;
Bottle brush.
Basic ingredients needed to get you started and keep you going:
Campden tablets;
Acid blend powder (or appropriate amount of acid your recipe calls for);
Yeast nutrient;
Yeast;
Pectic enzyme;
Water (we use bottled spring water because our tap water can taste funny at times);
X pounds of whatever you are going to make your wine out of;
Sugar;
There are also wine kits that come with specific juices for the types of wine that you want to make. These can be a little spendy, but if it’s the dead of winter and you can’t get your hands on good, fresh fruit or grapes, these could save the day. (Oftentimes, these kits come with all the chemicals & additives you will need, plus instructions, so this may well be a great way to try your hand at homemade wine.)
Little extras that will make your wine making easier (and even a little less sloppy):
A wine thief;
An auto-siphon with appropriate sized rubber tubing;
A wine corker, especially if you plan on using corks;
Labels;
Shrink capsules for your corked bottles – for vanity purposes.
You may have a wine supply store near you, or, if you are like us, we initially purchased our kit online, and ordered the chemicals, yeast, nutrient, etc. online until we found our local (okay, it’s about 45 minutes from home) dealer.
There are many recipes online for wine if you don’t have a recipe book, but the first step is to pick one and stick as close to it as you can. There will be those times where you know something needs to be sweetened, or diluted, and you can make adjustments as you go, but do take notes.
What follows is just a general guide of the steps that are taken to produce a good to awesome batch of grape wine (mead is done a little differently). Our first batch was made of noble grapes, which created a nice, dry, full-bodied red.
Sterilize/sanitize EVERYTHING that you plan on using that will come into contact with your fruit/must/wine!
Wash your fruit, remove stems and toss any rotten or bruised fruit, and crush your grapes. I used a plastic potato masher in a large plastic bowl and when the fruit in the bowl was smashed and juicy, I poured the contents into the strainer bag, which was already placed in our primary fermentation bucket. You will want to figure about six or so pounds of grapes per gallon.
Extract some of the juice and test the acid level. This is where your acid test kit comes in handy. Follow the instructions that come with it to see what your acid level is. You are going to want to ensure your juice is .65% tartaric. Your test kit will tell you how much of what to add to your juice to raise or lower your numbers. Also, there is math involved here. You may be adding water or you may be adding acid blend, or you may get lucky out of the gate and not have to add anything.
Once your acid level is where it needs to be, you will be adding sugar until your specific gravity ends up between 1.095 and 1.100. A great video on how to read your hydrometer can be found at http://youtu.be/ty7PAJaBsts and it really cleared things up for me. Once you get your specific gravity within range, write it down. You will need it again when you bottle to calculate your approximate alcohol content.
At this point, our recipe had us add everything except the yeast to our must (which is what it’s called). In our case we added Pectic Enzyme, yeast nutrient and campden tablets that we crushed. Give it a good stir, cover it loosely with the lid and just walk away.
After 24 hours add your yeast. We use wine yeast, and while some recipes tell you that you can just toss the dry yeast in, I prefer to activate mine and then make a yeast starter. Basically you follow the instructions on the yeast packet to activate it, noting how much water you used. Give the yeast no more than 30 minutes to activate. Pull an equal amount of must out of your bucket and add to the yeast & water, give a little stir and it should foam up and double to triple in volume. At this point, pour the mixture as evenly as you can over the must in the bucket. Cover and walk away.
Stir daily, checking specific gravity. This is where having a wine thief and a graduated cylinder come in handy. When you SG (specific gravity) reaches 1.030 (about five days) you can remove the straining bag, gently draining the juice out of it. Discard the contents in the straining bag.
The next step is called “racking” and this is when you siphon the wine off the sediment from the bucket into your secondary fermentation container. We use glass carboys. An auto-siphon is an awesome thing to use for this. Once you have siphoned your wine into the secondary, attach your airlock. This allows air from getting into the fermenter, but lets the wine continue to ferment and the gas has somewhere to go. You’ll know it’s working because you’ll see the water in the airlock bubble as the gas comes up through the tube.
When the SG reaches 1.00 (about three or so weeks), siphon again and re-rack into a clean secondary. What we did, because we only had one appropriately sized glass carboy was sanitized the primary fermentation bucket, siphoned the wine into it, then washed and sanitized (after pouring out the sediment, or lees) the carboy and re-siphoned it back into the carboy and re-attached the airlock.
After this you pretty much walk away and forget it. You may choose to re-rack in two months to aid in clearing, but that is basically all you do to make the wine.
We bottled our first batch early, because of Christmas, but it could have stayed racked for another month or so. Every now and then, taste test it. The longer it sits in the secondary fermenter, the better it will taste.
As for bottling, there are numerous videos out there that will show you the process a whole lot better than I can try to explain it.
I have pictures of the red wine and mead processes over on my blog, www.musingsfromaworkaholic.com, as well as the notes that we took/are taking during our second and third batches.
A huge thank you to Amanda Z. for allowing me to invade her blog.
No, thank YOU Julie!
Drunkenly,
Amanda Z
Domesticology
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