Home Wine Making 101 – The Basics
One of the best kept secrets is by far the fact that just about anyone can make their own wine. Whether that wine tastes good and can measure up to your own preferences for quality compared to what you purchase at the store or wine shop is another subject. There some basic facts that you need to know If you are beginning to research the subject of Making Homemade Wine, these can make the rest of your work that much easier.
Wine makers and connoisseurs of fermentation use certain “terms” to refer to the various steps and processes that have to happen in order to turn fruit or juice into wine. Learning and knowing them can help make your journey toward making homemade wine that much easier.
One of the first things you have to do to your juice, before adding the yeast is called “musting”. This is where you add some kind of a sulfite to the juice to make sure that you kill all of the bacteria that might be already living in the juice. Typically, Campden Tablets are used for this and they are crushed, dissolved in water and then added to the juice and given atleast 24 hours to do their work.
The next step is called “pitching” – this is the act of adding the yeast to your juice. The types of yeast that you can “pitch” vary widely from the most common baking yeast that you can get in the grocery store to specialty yeast strains that are used by expert wine makers. Different strains of yeast can greatly affect the taste of the wine both negatively and positively depending on your tastes and preferences.
The last important term to learn in making homemade wine is “racking”. This is where you move the wine form one container to the next between its primary and secondary fermentation process. There are several ways to do this, but typically some sort of plastic tubing is use to siphon the wine. It is important to not disturb the sediment that have fallen to the bottom of your containers, because the wine that sits there often has an “off” taste.
Learning the art of making homemade wine takes time and patience, but can be achieved and is very rewarding when you finally find a great recipe and produce a really good batch of homemade wine. Take the time to educate yourself and with trial and error you will become an expert wine maker and be able to share your art with your family and friends.
