Home Wine making – the basics (or, help me to get started)

I seem to remember I may have started a thread on this before, but can’t seem to find it. Even if I did, I never acted on it and things may have changed since then.

Has anyone got experience of making their own wines?
What is the minimum equipment requirement to begin, and what is the best material / manufacturer for this?

Can you make wine out of any product? (I had a friend at Uni who said his dad made wine from rosehips, petals, pine cones, all sorts of things.) Is this possible? Is it still wine?

We have an orchard on our land to the rear of our house which has apple, plum and damson trees and lots of brambles with berries. Can any / all of these be used to make wine? Would the apples be better used to make cider? How does the techniques for this vary, and would I need further or completely separate equipment to do so?

What are the main pitfalls? What can go wrong? What should I look out for to enable me to sidestep these issues? How long is the minimum fermentation process? Can I poison myself, or will the worst that happens be that I end up with some horrible tasting wine?

If you have any experience at all in home brewing please share it here. Thanks for all stories, anecdotes and words of wisdom which can help my future venture.

Minimum equipment: A purpose-built plastic bucket with a lid. Hasta be the right kind of plastic so as not to impart any off flavours.

Some one-gallon glass demijohns (squat glass bottles with rabbit-ear handles) and fermentation locks.

Sterilizing powder. Again, get the purpose-made stuff. Wild organisms living in your wine are the death.

Some clear plastic tubing for siphoning.

Wine yeast (baker’s yeast is not a good substitute, flavour-wise).

Campden tablets (these are for sterilizing the wine itself, not the equipment)

Used wine bottles and new corks, plus a corking machine and a mallet.

I’d recommend bramble berries (I believe they’re the same as we call “blackberries”) for both novice and experienced winemaker. You also need cane sugar as most wild berries don’t have anything like enough sugar to ferment to a worthwhile alcohol content.

You can make an acceptable drink as follows:

Sterilize all your gear.

Pick 3lb of bramble berries, wash 'em in cold water and then boil up a couple of pints of water. Mash the berries with whatever’s to hand, putting the pulp in the fermenting bucket. Pour over the boiling water and continue mashing - this helps extract juice from the fruit. Add cold water to make up to a half-gallon of roughly blood-heat mess and add yeast as per instructions on the packet. Some yeasts you can add directly, others prefer to be started off in blood-heat water with a little sugar. Put the lid on it and give it three or four days, lifting the lid a couple of times a day to break up the raft of fruit which will be forming and give the whole thing a stir with a wooden or plastic spoon.

Now siphon the liquid off the pulp into the gallon demijohn. Make up to one gallon with two pounds of sugar dissolved in water (bring the water to the boil, add the sugar, dissolve it, cool to blood heat or below). Note: It may be a good idea to reserve a couple of pints of the mixture (“must”) in a separate bottle. Cotton wool is not a bad stopper for such.

Leave in a warm-ish but not too hot place and watch it go ballistic as the yeast goes yummy-yummy-yummy over the sugar hit. Your fermentation lock will be bubbling like crazy. Beware of letting things get super-critical as you don’t want froth bubbling out of the fermentation lock. When things cool down a little, add the reserved must. Then leave it alone until the fermentation has pretty much died off.

Now siphon the mixture off the sediment that has fallen to the bottom of the demijohn (this process is called “racking”) and let it continue to ferment, if it will. You may need to repeat this process a few times until mounting alcohol levels finally kill off the yeast.

Rack once again and add a crushed Campden tablet to the wine, following the instructions on the packet. This is to make sure the yeast is good and dead. In-bottle fermentation can give you blown corks (if you’re lucky) or exploding glass bottles (if you’re not).

Siphon the wine into bottles and cork them. Label them up and leave them alone for as long as you have the willpower, then open up a bottle and find out if it’s all been worth it.

Usually things will not go wrong as long as you keep everything surgically clean and keep air and vinegar flies away from your must. For a list of pitfalls and methods for dealing with curable problems, seriously, get a book. There are many excellent ones which will answer all your questions, including some you didn’t know you had, and also give recipes (the above is a little hit and miss). Many ingredients are indeed usable - I have made walnut-leaf before now with some success (hint of apple and ginger, if you’re curious).

Thanks for all that. Great post.

Can you recommend any particular book that covers all the basics I need to know? Something simple to follow, yet practical, informative and useful. Lots of pictures are a plus! :wink:

Also, where’s the best place to pick up all the material necessaries? Any UK chain stores carry them, or is it a mail order job? Thanks again.

Also: For anyone reading this, I just found this Home Winemaking site which seems pretty informative. Pictures and everything!

Like maybe even Army Worms?

Anyway, I’ve made lilac wine and dandelion wine in my day, and these use the flowers solely as a way to give the wine a nice taste and aroma. In other words, the flowers are not a major component of the wine – you still need to smash up a sugar-containing fruit to give the yeast something to eat.

I imagine that what your Uni friend’s Dad called rosehip/petals/pine cone wine was really a grape or other fruit-based wine with the extra ingredient for flavoring.
Malacandra gave excellent advice in his/her post. That, and a good book would do you well.

My advice is:

  1. Start with wines that don’t need to age for a long time, and fruit wines (i.e., non-grape) are good for this. You want to be able to taste your results relatively soon, so if something went wrong, you’ll know in a year or so (as opposed to three years) and can make adjustments accordingly for the next batch.

  2. Consider fermenting in gallon glass jugs, such as cider jugs. You can have several going at once, each with a slightly (or completely) different mixture, so you can find out what you like (and what you do best) without committing yourself to 25 bottles of the stuff. As a compromise, you could use a 3-gallon carboy (yields 15 bottles) rather than the standard 5 gallon (25 bottles).

  3. If you make a fruit wine, be sure to use pectic enzyme. This will remove the naturally occurring fruit pectin which will otherwise cloud your wine.

  4. Don’t pinch pennies when it comes to buying yeast. Buy the good stuff (and make sure it’s fresh) – it’s what really makes or breaks your wine.

  5. Be clean. If your basement or the area where you will be making your wine has even the slightest smell of mold in the air, you’re toast. The mold WILL find a way to infect your bottles, and they will turn skunky, no matter how many campden tablets you use.

That’s all I can think of for now. Oh wait, find a good supplier in your town, if you can. The guys/gals who work there love the business and can offer great advice. I hope you’re not stuck with mail order to get your supplies.

Spiff

I see now that you’re from Nothern Ireland.

Perhaps my mention of cider jugs might be confusing to you. Here in the States, apple cider typically comes in these large, squat one-gallon glass jugs, but they may not be typical elsewhere.

And BTW, your cider tastes a lot better that ours! :wink: