Quick wine making! (Winemaking Helpful Hints and Tips)

Member Name: janharper

Product:	Winemaking Helpful Hints and Tips
Date:	03/06/01 (918 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cheap wine

Disadvantages: takes time

If you are a student, or just an impatient person like me, then you just won't have the time to wait a year or thereabouts for homemade wine to be ready to drink.

You don't have to wait that long if you take a short cut. Use a kit from somewhere like Wilkinsons and you can have drinkable wine in around a month. It works out much cheaper than buying it by the bottle.

These kits vary in price depending on what is included. You can buy the whole thing including bottles for under twenty pounds and set yourself as a 'mini vintners'. It's much cheaper to buy a tub containing yeast, concentrated fruit extract, and full instructions. This will cost about six pounds.

You don't need very much equipment either. Get yourself a glass demijohn and an airlock to start with. You will also need sugar and water according to the instructions in the tub.

The most important thing to remember is that you must keep everything spotlessly clean. If you don't, your wine will be sour and you won't be able to drink it. It's happened to me! Red wine turned to vinegar and it was really foul. The only use for it was as a drain cleaner.

When the wine has fermented and cleared (all explained in your kit), you will need bottles to store it in, some corks and a length of plastic tubing to syphon it into the bottles. However, if you are a student or have a group of friends to share this with it probably won't last very long. You can syphon it off into a clean demijohn, put a rubber bung in the top and serve it from there.

It's quite satisfying to make your own wine and you don't even need to admit to using a kit! It's cheap so you can afford to be generous.

Enjoy! Remember that this can be very strong though, and don't blame me if you get a hangover!

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