Making wine yourself. (Winemaking Helpful Hints and Tips)

Member Name: Bryn Pearson

Product:	Winemaking Helpful Hints and Tips
Date:	31/05/01 (730 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: interesting tastes and strengths, makes great presents.

Disadvantages: bit fiddly and time consuming, you have to be patient for a year while it ferments.

Home made wine is a lot easier than you might htink. I would recomend getting a good book, but here are some tips that will give you some ideas.

Equiptment - one big container with a lid, glass Demi-Johns, empty wine bottles, corks, a plastic tube for siphoning off your wine, a bag for straining your wine, wine yeast, sugar, fruit (Or veg) .

Most of these can be bought from Boots. You can get packages of stuff to use instead of fruit, but that isn't much fun at all.

If you can eat it and it is a plant, then you can make wine out of it. There are also flowers that make good wine, but to avoid poisoning yourself, I recomend sticking to things you know it's safe to eat. From experience, plums, damsons, elderberries, rice, carrots, and grapes work really well. Gooseberry I'm not a big fan of.

So, either buy your chosen fruit or veg, or go pick it (Elderberries cannot be bought sadley.) Wash carefully to remove bugs, then remove any unwanted leaves, twigs and the like. Weigh your fruit.

Generally, a pound of fruit to a pound of sugar works pretty well, but this gives you no control over the sweetness or dryness of your wine. If you want to know what you might be getting, use a recepeie from a book rather than following this. usibng your big, sealable container, add a gallon of boiling water for every pound of fruit. Add the sugar as well. (Again, recepies vary but generally this works.) Wait around until the whole thing cools down to body temperature, then add the wine yeast.

For the enxt ten days, every morning and evening, stir your wine with a big spoon. Once the ten days are up, strian it. You can get a straining bag from boots, or make a big bag out of a fine material. I recomend straining bu getting out cupfulls of wine and pouring them through the bag into your saucepans, bowls and cups.

Throw away the residue, put it on the compost heap.

Using your plastic tube, you can your wine
into your demijohn. So long as the container your wine starts in is higher up than the one it's going to, this works really well. You may have to suck the tube a bit to get it started, which makes for a sampling opportunity.

You need air locks to go in the top of your demijohn - get these from Boots. hese contain water and allow you to see gas coming up from your wine. yeast makies gas as it ferments. When the bubbles stop, the fermenting has stopped.

Fermenting takes an unspecifiable period of time, depending on what you've used and how warm it is. You can tell when the wine has finished because it stops bubbling. Be very wary - its better to leave your wine in the demijohn for an extra month than to bottle it up early and have the bottle explode.

Leave your wine in bottles for a few months to a year.

Depending on how much wine you drink, if you get into the habit of making new batches every six months or so, you can arrange to have a permenant supply.

Homemade wine tends to be a lot stronger than shop bought stuff, so handle with care as you can get very, very drunk on it.

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