Making Homemade Wine; Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletin A-75

Making Homemade Wine Robert Cluett CONTENTS Introduction Equipment Ingredients Basic Techniques of Winemaking Winemaking Step by Step Day-to-Day Summary Troubleshooting Recipes Universal Wine Recipe Chart Introduction Wine is probably the most ancient and widespread alcoholic drink. It has been around at least several thousand years, as the literature of both the ancient Greeks and Hebrews tells us. Today, alcohol is available in a wide variety of forms: wines, beers, and distilled spirits. But it is wine that is the most popular with home brewers. Wine is the easiest alcohol to make. It does not require the fastidious temperature control involved in brewing beer. Unlike distilled spirits, it requires no still and does not invite the curiosity of the revenue agents — unless you undertake to sell the wine you produce, and we do not recommend doing that. You can make fine wines from grapes or other fruits, or you can make it from vegetables, grains, or flowers. This bulletin will take the mystery out of making wine. We will teach you the language of winemakers and explain what ingredients and equipment are essential to the process. We will offer some reliable and delicious wine recipes, and we will tell you the cure and prevention of 11 common problems — in case anything goes wrong with your wine. But we don’t expect anything to go wrong. So, enjoy! As with any specialty, winemaking has a language all its own. Before we go any further, let me introduce you to some of the terms you will come across in the text. Champagning: The process of trapping carbonation into a still wine with a second, sealed ferment. Cider: The customarily low-alcohol (6 to 9 percent) wine made from apples. Sometimes made sparkling, usually made still. Fining: The removal of small-particle cloudiness from a wine. Maderize: To cook a wine until it is like a Madeira. Wines stored at too high a temperature often will be said to be maderized. Must: The dense liquid from which a wine begins. The point at which must stops being must and starts being wine is indefinite, but is generally conceded to be about SG (specific gravity) 1.030, or the point at which 60 percent of the sugar is converted into alcohol to give an alcoholic content of at least 7 percent. Pearl: The carbon dioxide bubbles in a very slightly fermenting wine. Some wines, designed for a texture between champagne and still wine, are bottled when there is still a slight pearl in them. Perry: Cider made from pears. See cider. Plonk: A corruption of the French blanc, commonly used to denote a common white wine of French origin. Rack: To siphon wine from one vessel to another. Specific gravity: The density of a liquid as a fraction of the weight of water. A wine must with a lot of sugar in it will weigh between 8 percent and 12 percent more than water, hence will have a specific gravity (SG) of between 1.080 and 1.120. When these musts ferment out to the point where no sugar is left, they will give wines that weigh between 0.7 percent and 1.2 percent less than water (alcohol being lighter than water). The more alcoholic a finished dry wine is, the lower its SG. Vinify: Literally, “to turn to wine.” Equipment You do not need much equipment to make wine at home. Many of the items listed here may already be in your home. The rest should be available at any store that sells winemaking equipment. If there are no such stores in your area, you can order equipment from the suppliers listed in the back of this bulletin. Essential Items These are the pieces of equipment you will need to get started in home winemaking. Air locks: These let carbon dioxide gas out of the carboy and prevent air from getting in. Buy one for each carboy. Carboys: Large glass vessels used as secondary fermenters. Carboys hold 5 gallons of liquid. You need an extra empty carboy to rack wine into, so buy one more carboy than you plan to make batches of wine. Funnel: Buy a large one. Hose and J-tube: For siphoning and keeping the siphon level above that of the dead yeast in the bottom of the vessel. Hydrometer set: Includes a hydrometer to measure the sugar content in the must and a tall tube.