Manufacturing wine brings to mind artisans with years of experience, crafting an expensive and refined vintage beside a picturesque vineyard. If you don't own such a place, and are in more of a hurry, you can still make your own wine at home. Trevor van Hemert uses a variety of methods, but this process for producing wine directly from grapes is a simple starting point for budding vintners.
To produce the juice, obtain 40kg of not-too-ripe grapes from a farmer's market, a grape press and a 30-litre bucket with a seal. You'll also need 3 to 4kg of sugar and a wine or Champagne yeast packet. For fermentation, get a 25-litre plastic or glass water bottle, a rubber stopper with a 6mm hole in the middle, an airlock, a stirrer able to reach into the glass bottle, a funnel, a turkey baster and a siphon (an autosiphon device from a homebrew shop is best). You'll also need a solution with which to sanitise your implements. Coffee filters and a hydrometer will help you to perfect your wine, but they're not essential.
Unwanted bacteria would love to live in the vat of sugar-water that you will be making, so it's best to keep them out from the start. Before embarking on (and during) your wine-making journey, clean all implements that will touch your juice. Van Hemert uses a solution called PBW to wash his implements, and Star San to eliminate organisms still residing on his equipment. Home brewers are quite adamant about cleanliness, citing this as the most critical aspect for successful fermentation.
Rinse your grapes, then insert them into the wine press – manual models using a crank and a huge screw in the middle are ideal. Crush the grapes so the juice runs into the 30-litre bucket. Let it sit for a few days to allow sediment to collect on the bottom. Raise the bucket above the 25-litre fermentation vessel, known as a carboy, and siphon the juice into it, holding back a litre or so. Keep the hose out of the sediment on the bottom of the bucket and use a coffee filter on the siphon hose to eliminate even more detritus.
Insert a funnel in your carboy and add 3kg of sugar. Stir the sugar and juice for around two minutes. Use the funnel to pour in yeast. Siphon the remaining juice into the jug to wash the yeast down, leaving about 10cm of space between the juice and the neck of the bottle. This will allow foam to build up during fermentation. Van Hemert prefers his wine to be in the 15 per cent alcohol-by-volume range. Optionally, to ensure this level of alcohol, sample the sugar content with your turkey baster and test its "gravity" with a hydrometer. If it is too low, add sugar in small increments, then stir and re-test.
Using the stopper, attach your airlock. This will let gasses escape during fermentation, while keeping sediment out of your fermenting wine. Place this bottle somewhere cool – around 20 degrees C – where it won't be disturbed, then wait four weeks. Check, but don't remove, the airlock a few times in the first few days to make sure it's functioning correctly. After four weeks, take a sample out with your turkey baster and taste. If it tastes good, move on to bottling. If not, let it age for another week or so and repeat.
Remove the airlock and lower your siphon into the liquid, making sure it doesn't rest on the yeast that has collected on the bottom of the container. Place the large fermentation container above the bottles to be filled. Suck on the siphon tubing to start the process, then regulate the flow of the liquid into the bottles with your finger and thumb. If you want to eliminate much of the yeast before bottling, you can place a coffee filter over the siphon tubing to catch it. Once your bottles are full, put the caps on securely. Congratulations – you've just bottled your first batch of wine. Enjoy responsibly!
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
