Most people that have tasted fine wine have toyed with the idea of making their own wine at home. Making homemade wine is a process that can be perfected with time to come from good and transform into yourself to a great home winemaker. It all takes patience and several trials before perfecting a certain taste and blend. However and to start with, you need to experiment and start off knowing and implementing atleast one of the many varieties of wines including Grape wine, Apple, pineapple, strawberry, flower wine and many more.
How To Make Homemade Wine From Grape Juice: Step #1- Get A Recipe And Start Mashing
You can start at a small level where you use straight forward fruits before graduating to blending various tastes and aromas. To set us rolling, we can start off with making grape juice wine with grapes from your local store. If you are using any other fruit besides grapes, you will need to use wine yeast. Baking yeast may not be very ideal as it will leave your wine with a heavy taste and may spoil the end result.
Making Homemade Wine from Grape Juice: Step #2 Make A Wine Must
Now that you have the grapes ready, mash them to a pulp. Add 5-10 gallons of clean water to the mixture. Add another gallon of boiling water, some sugar or honey and stir the solution. This solution is called the must and its the base mixture from which your wine will make the primary fermentation. Let the mixture cool for 24hrs. To sterilize the must, add some campden tablets which contain sodium bisulphate which kills off all the harmful bacteria and prevents growth of mold.
Homemade Wine from Grape Juice: Step #3 - Primary Fermentation Of Wine Must
Cover the must with a clean cheese cloth and let this solution to ferment for 10 days to ferment. For other fruits like Apple, pineapple, strawberry; add yeast at this stage. Remember to use yeast that is meant for making wine as bread wine, while ok, produces an after taste in grape juice wine. Stir the must everyday making sure to turn all the contents and replace the cheese cloth covering.
Make Your Own Wine from Grape Juice: Step #4 Fermentation Lock
After the 10 days wait period, strain the must and remove the flower and pulp sediments. Pour the solution into a clear glass jar and close it up with a fermentation lock. This is a very important secondary fermentation phase. The fermentation lock keeps the oxygen out of the liquid because it inhibits fermentation while releasing the carbon dioxide produced in wine fermentation.
How to Make Your Own Wine from Grape Juice: Step #5 Secondary Wine Must Fermentation
Keep the glass jar in a warm environment for another 6 weeks. This is called the secondary fermentation and it is what determines the quality of your wine. Keep observing the colored liquid until no more bubbles can be seen. This means that the fermentation process is complete and all the sugar/honey has been used up and the yeast bacteria are dead.
How to Make Homemade Wine from Grape Juice: Step #6 Wine Aging Vessel Decanting
After the 6 weeks secondary wine fermentation period, decant the solution from the jar into a wine aging glass vessel/pot. This vessel is round and looks like a giant glass pot with a tight cork/lid. Use a plastic pipe/hose to decant the wine from the jar so as to ensure no sediments go to the wine aging vessel. Now let the wine sit in the wine aging glass vessel until it turn to a clear color. Now you can again pour it out into proper wine bottles for storage.
How to Make Homemade Wine from Grape Juice: Step #7 Fill the Wine Bottles and Put on Wine Rack
Cork the wine bottles and store them away in a wine rack. You can put it in your basement or anywhere where they will not be tampered. You can now decide to keep the wine for a month or a year or two before opening. As they say wine matures with age, and yours will taste better, the longer you give it.
You can keep on experimenting on different fruit mixtures according to the recipes you have until you get the best taste, feel and smell of your fine own home made wine. If you manage to make a really unique blend of fine wine, let your friends taste it, and it wont be long before public demand forces you to turn into a homemade winery. Good wine sells itself.
Kindly get a more detailed starters-wine-making-recipe from this website here below.
