How to Make Homemade Wine

From LoveToKnow Wine

If you want to know how to make homemade wine, you have a variety of options. You can do a lot of research and set up a mini winery,or, you can purchase kits that all include all the basic wine-making equipment and supplies.

Basics: How to Make Homemade Wine

By making your own wine you can enjoy the many details of wine making such as:

  • Fermentation – when yeast eats the sugar and gives off alcohol
  • Crushing the fruit
  • Extracting the juice
  • Aging the wine
  • Filtering the wine
  • Bottling the wine

Although there are many steps to making wine, it takes less than a month to complete the actual process. Some home wine makers may want a richer wine and may choose to barrel age their wine for several additional years before they bottle the wine.

More Than Grapes

Many home winemakers enjoy making the more traditional grape-based wine either from fresh grapes or from grape concentrate bases designed to make wine. The bases tend to be easier to use than fresh grapes since the bases have been developed taking into account the acidic and sugar levels of the grapes.

Many fruits and nuts like apples, pears, strawberries and almonds can also make excellent wines. An Internet search will turn up an assortment of recipes and tips. Slightly overripe fruit tends to enhance the specific taste of the wine. For example, ripe pears would result in a pear wine that really tastes like pears and not apples. Making fruit wine can be an excellent way to enjoy fruit harvests from your backyard and to share the bounty of your harvests in the form of wine with your friends.

One of the easier non-grape wines to make is mead, a honey-based wine. There are many different varieties of mead to make. The many varieties result from the many mead recipes available as well as the source of the honey itself. For example, a light clover honey will make a very different tasting mead than a dark buckwheat honey.

Kits

Some home winemakers jump into winemaking by purchasing all the equipment, supplies and fresh fruit needed. Other winemakers learn how to make homemade wine with purchased kits of equipment and wine bases. As their experience and wine-making interest grows, a winemaker may decide to buy additional wine making equipment and only use fresh fruit - or, they may decide to stay with the convenience of the kits.

Equipment

Regardless of the fruit you choose, or the recipe you select, you will need some basic wine equipment to make, ferment, filter, bottle and cork the wine.

A good way for a wine making newbie to start is with a one-time purchase of a basic wine making hardware "kit." The kit will include everything you need to make wine except the fruit and the bottles. A kit with a six gallon capacity will cost about $90. It usually includes:

  • Fermenting container with lid (to mix the wine and start the fermentation)
  • Carboy (bottle in which wine is made)
  • Stoppers for fermenter and carboy
  • Airlock and hydrometer
  • Siphon tubing
  • Bottle filler
  • Corker and corks

Wine Bases

If you don't have the fruit, honey or other wine-making ingredients, there are wine kits available with different types of wine bases:

  • Premium wine kits for both red and white dry wines, with varietal grape juice and yeast for the particular variety selected
  • Wine kits for fruit wines
  • Kits for specialty wines such as sweet wines like peach ice wine

Personalize Your Creation

Once your special homemade wine is bottled, you can continue the fun of making your own wine by personalizing your wine with special labels available online:

More Resources on Making Homemade Wine

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