Wine making

Last year I bought a wine making kit for my boyfriend for Christmas.  Having never made wine before we weren't quite sure what to expect with our first attempt. We decided to start with something simple so if we messed it up, we wouldn't be out a lot of money or effort, so Welch's grape juice wine is what we made.  I can't say that I remember the exact ingredients that we used but I think it went along the lines of grape juice (enough for 6 gallons), water, sugar, and wine yeast.  We decided not to use the Camden tablets or any other additives that web sites suggested because we just wanted to see if the basic process worked.

It all starts with mixing the grape juice, water, sugar and yeast in the fermentation bucket.  Once that is done it just needs to sit for about a week and bubble away.

The next step is to transfer the wine from the bucket into a glass carboy.  Thankfully the kit comes with a pump to make the job much easier and allows the sediment (aka yeast bodies and stuff) to remain at the bottom.  Once the wine was transferred we just corked it with the bubbler thing that allows gas to escape and put it in a dark, cool room until the bubbling stopped - which took about a month, maybe two.

Once we were sure that the fermentation had stopped it was time to transfer the wine into bottles.  We had saved a bunch of bottles over the months for just such an occasion.  First we had to sterilize the bottles by soaking them in a bleach solution and then rinsed them with hot water.  We set the clean bottles in the sun to dry.

Once the bottles were dry we filled them with our wine and corked them with a corker.  Without a corker I think it would be darn near impossible to get those things to fit inside the bottle! 

The finished product tasted a whole lot like wine, though maybe not as strong as some of the stuff you can find at the store.  For a red wine it was not as dry as they normally seem to be and was a bit sweeter than what you would expect.  This one batch of wine filled about 30 wine bottles which sounds like a lot, but once you start giving them away, it really isn't that much. 

 

A few weeks later we discovered that our fermentation may not have been finished - our wine became fizzy like champagne.  Either that or we used the wrong kind of yeast.  Thankfully we gave away and drank it fast enough that no bottles exploded on us (or anyone else).  Guess we have to do a little more research on how to tell when your wine is finished.