DIY mini course wine making at home

What exactly is wine?

If you want to make wine from fruit other than grapes, you will almost always have to make the juice suitable for fermentation. The yeast you add must be able to convert the fermentable sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

You take care of:
• Sufficient fermentable sugars in the juice.
• The correct acidity of the juice.
• Sufficient nutrients for the yeast cells, add yeast food if necessary.

Yeast cells love tomato paste. Take a can of double concentrated tomato paste without salt (perfect nutrient) and add 1 or more teaspoons to your fermenter. Especially if the fermentation is difficult to get started.

Work cleanly!

Boiling water can also be useful for disinfecting spoons and can replace sulphite.

Most commercial wines contain added sulfites. If you work clean, this is not necessary at all. So don't add it to your homemade wine.

So only use sulphite as a disinfectant for your bottles and tools. Not as a preservative because that's what the alcohol and any tannins present in the wine are for.

What do you need:

• Kitchen tools such as ladles, bottle brush, funnel, cooking pan and an accurate scale.
• An open fermentation vessel. A sauerkraut barrel (white with red lid) is very useful for this. In this vessel you can first crush the pulp well before adding water with sugar. You can do that very well with a thick round stick that you have disinfected first.
• Wine press. A simple wine press will suffice. Often the fruit to be pressed is first placed in a wine press bag. This bag, with fruits and all, then goes into the press. This will give you clearer juice.
• Demijohns or otherwise and fitted with a sealing stopper with a water seal.
• Food grade siphon and hoses.
• Clean tea towels.
• Thermometer can sometimes be usefull.
• Hydrometer, with which you can measure the specific gravity of the must. In other words, you can see how much fermentable sugar is in the liquid. You can then not only calculate how much alcohol will be produced, you can also see from the meter whether your wine has really finished fermenting.
• Sulphite powder (Campden or potassium pyrosulfite E224) for cleaning your bottles and tools.
• Citric acid, you use in combination with sulphite and strengthens its effect.
• Wine yeast.

Wine yeast

Hydrometer

You can also use the hydrometer to check whether the must has fully fermented. This is very important because bottling too early can be dangerous. These can explode during secondary fermentation in the bottle and nobody wants that.

If the hydromer indicates an SG of 1000 or even less, all the sugar has been converted to alcohol and you have made a dry wine.

A hydrometer is made of glass and is also called an aerometer, beer wort meter, density meter, densimeter, must meter or sugar meter.

Collecting fruit

You can let the squeezed skins of your fruit ferment for a few days (pulp fermentation) to give more flavor or color to your wine. This often also brings tannin (tannic acid) into the wine. This increases the shelf life, but also means that the wine has to lie longer before it is ready to drink.

To work

Method

1. Crush the fruit to release the juices. They used to do that with their feet (in Portugal they still do), better is a thick wooden pestle and a clean barrel.
2. Then squeeze out the juice. A wine press is of course ideal. Squeezing by hand in a clean tea towel and in a clean pan is easy, but often works too.
3. The juice can be placed directly in a fermentation vessel that is sufficiently spacious so that there is still room above the fermenting wine for foam to develop.
4. Add enough water and sugar (always dissolve the sugar in boiling water first and add it in steps if necessary)
5. Add yeast (if necessary) and wine yeast that matches the fruit. If you make a yeast starter, you are assured that the fermentation will start quickly. This way you don't give any bad bacteria a chance.
6. Fit your barrel with a water seal. Fermentation can start!
7. If the first fermentation is very intense, you can only put a cotton ball in the top of your airlock at first to stop vinegar flies. When the fermentation has calmed down, you can fill the airlock with a little water.
8. After a few months, transfer to another clean vessel or fermentation bottle without sucking the dead yeast from the bottom. Make sure there is as little air as possible above the wine this time and let the wine ferment further (we call this the second fermentation)

You can use the moment of siphoning for the 2nd fermentation to check the acidity of your wine in the making. If you follow the given recipes you can also skip this check.

Pulp fermentation

The bitter tannin increases the shelf life, but also has a major influence on the taste. A wine with a lot of tannin often has to sit for years until it has become drinkable due to taste development.

1. Crush the fruit so that the juices are released and pour the whole mass into an open container, for example a large white plastic bucket that is suitable for food.
2. Add enough water and sugar (always dissolve the sugar in boiling water first and add it in steps)
3. Add vitamins (if necessary) and a wine yeast that matches the fruit.
4. Cover the vessel tightly with a clean tea towel. String around it to be sure because no vinegar flies can get to it.
5. Stir twice a day with a wooden ladle or stainless steel spatula and push floating pulp back into the juice to prevent spoilage.
6. After the pulp fermentation, you can press the mass and let it ferment in a demijohn or vessel with a water seal. In other words: 'fermentation in barrel'
   Sieve the liquid through a funnel with a clean cloth into a fermentation bottle with a water seal. A cheesecloth is ideal for this purpose, a tea towel will work too. If you are lucky enough to have a wine press, you can entrust the pulp to it to extract the last bits of wine.

Fermentation in a barrel

A glass transparent fermentation bottle (carboy) is ideal because you can follow the entire process well. Nowadays there are also good plastic alternatives available. Always put the bottle in a dark place or cover it so that no light can reach your wine. Because you don't want your wine to lose color.

Over time, you will see a thickening white layer of dead yeast cells on the bottom of your fermentation bottle. These yeast cells eventually succumbed to the alcohol they produced.

To prevent this dead yeast from giving your wine a yeasty taste, transfer the wine to a new clean bottle after a few months. Try to prevent as much as possible yeast cells from the bottom to the new bottle.

Now make sure there is as little air as possible above the wine and let the wine ferment further.

You can use a moment of siphoning to check the acidity of your wine in the making. There are special meters for that. If you follow the given recipes you can also skip this.

Clearing

However, many winemakers transfer their fermented wine a third time to a clean barrel that is put away for a few weeks in a cold environment. At a cold temperature (the colder, the better) the wine becomes super clear. Those who have a cellar - with a cold concrete floor - can count themselves lucky.

Then comes the moment of bottling. But..... bubbles of carbon dioxide sometimes remain in the fermented wine, with the result that we experience it as a sparkling wine. If that is not the intention, you can first degas the wine before you put it in the bottle.

Bottling & Bottle finishing

Of course we always use new corks, which we disinfect by immersing them in hot water for some time. This also makes the cork more resilient and easier to squeeze into the bottle. Once the bottles are corked, we leave them upright for one to two days to allow the cork to recover. We are talking about old-fashioned natural corks. Of course you can also use synthetic corks.

Fill the bottles with your siphon and don't leave too much space under the cork. The less oxygen, the better. Handy devices for pressing the cork are available for little money.

After the bottles are filled and corked, you can store them lying down in a cool place to let your wine settle until ready to drink.

Of course you provide the bottles with a nice label and a shrink cap to cover the cork. A red capsule for red wine, a white capsule for white wine and a gold capsule for sparkling wine such as cider. You can unleash your creativity on the label. In any case, state what you made it from, the year and the alcohol content.