Fundamentals of Making Home Wine

By producing home-made wine, you will become one of the thousands of happy people that have already discovered this intriguing and rewarding hobby. Home wine making is not a big mystery. It`s a simple technique that truly brings its own rewards. There is nothing more satisfying than opening your own bottle of wine. If you are making wine for the first time you need to find the basic equipment such as:

• Large nylon straining bag

• Food-grade pail with lid (2 to 4 gallons)

• Cheesecloth

• Hydrometer

• Thermometer

• Acid titration kit

• Clear, flexible half-inch diameter plastic tubing

• Two one-gallon glass jugs

• Fermentation lock and bung

• Five 750-ml wine bottles

• Corks

• Hand corker

At the beginning you need to pick the grapes along with other ingredients. The grapes you are about to use must be clean of debris and insects so you can inspect them using a hydrometer to define the sugar level in it. Your real contribution here is small because Mother Nature will do her part with a healthy fermentation. Next, you need to adjust the juice with acid you can get it from the local shop.

Luckily, there are plenty of wine making books and thousands of recipes with wine making information you can learn from. Many wines will not have enough acid, so you will need to add 6-7 grams per litre red wine and 6.5-7.5 for dry white wine. You may also want to take a close look over the wine temperature to provide the perfect environment for the fermentation. During the storage you may also want to add some wine tannin to increase the charm of the wine to take and better advantage during the aging.

The most important ingredient is the wine yeast that turns the sugar into alcohol. In other words it will do the most important work. You don’t need to spend a ton of money on ingredients or equipment while making your first batch. You only need to get fermentation container to sip the wine in it during the appropriate period of time. The fermentation is the centrepiece compared to other activities when making wine. Getting the fermentation too warm or too cool may spoil the wine flavours before the alcohol is made.

The other item that may pique your interest is the fermentation lock while you are racking the wine away from the sediment. The next step is bottling your finished product and inserting a cork before you finally store your wine. Corks together with the equipment needs to be sterilized by using hot water, otherwise they may spoil your wine. Before you start your with wine making you need to learn one important difference. Red wines ferment with the skin and pulp in a plastic pail, while white wines are pressed before, so only the juice counts during the fermentation.