In theory, making wine is very simple. Yeast meets grape juice in an environment that allows fermentation. It’s such a natural process that wine was probably first discovered by happy accident thousands of years ago: Natural yeasts, blowing in the wind, settled down upon a bunch of squashed grapes, whose juice was pooling in the shaded bowl of a rock. After fermenting, some lucky passerby stops and stoops down for a taste…and likes what he discovers.
From there, the process of winemaking will be refined, as you can imagine, and the environment carefully controlled, to the point where winemaking becomes both science and art.
And DIY home winemaking? Well, it probably falls somewhere between the curious stone-age wanderer and the modern vintner who applies artful science to the process. Let’s take a look.
How to Make Homemade Wine
Winemaking at home requires several pieces of inexpensive equipment, serious cleanliness, and a mess of patience. Turns out, Tom Petty was right: “The waiting is the hardest part.”
Equipment Checklist:
- One 4-gallon food-grade-quality plastic bucket and lid to serve as the primary fermentation vat
- Three 1-gallon glass jugs to use as secondary fermentation containers
- A funnel that fits into the mouth of the glass bottles
- Three airlocks (fermentation traps)
- A rubber cork (or bung) to fit into the secondary fermentation container
- Large straining bag of nylon mesh
- About 6 feet of clear half-inch plastic tubing
- About 20 wine bottles (you’ll need 5 bottles per gallon of wine)
- Number 9-size, pre-sanitized corks
- Hand corker (ask about renting these from the wine supply store)
- A Hydrometer to measure sugar levels
Ingredient Checklist:
- Lots and lots of wine grapes
- Granulated sugar
- Filtered water
- Wine yeast
To the above basic list you can refine the process by adding such things as Campden tablets to help prevent oxidation, yeast nutrients, enzymes, tannins, acids, and other fancy ingredients to better control your wine production.
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