Wine Makery

[Trestkon]

After talking to a rather large number of people that make their own wine (and tasting it!) I've decided to give it a go. I dropped by a local store yesterday and picked up a starter kit that came with all the doodads and a box of juice/addatives. I'm not really a wine connoisseur but I do enjoy it, and when the price per bottle is going to be something like $2 I don't think I can go wrong (unless I really screw it up). The wine I chose to start with was a Pinto Grigio, mostly because my girlfriend likes it and I'm fairly indifferent to what type of wine I'm drinking.

I spent about two hours yesterday meticulously mixing and stiring things together while attempting to keep everything as sterile as possible and agonizing over the idea that any screwup could result in ending up with a vat of vinegar in four weeks. The 23 liters of mix (hopefully...I kind of forgot to mark the exact 23 liter mark, so I had to estimate :p) is currently sitting in my basement and hasn't yet exploded or melted through the pail, so things are going well!

Does anyone else make their own wine? Perhaps I can poach some helpful hints.

[Kee715]

I have tasted Wine, nasty stuff IMO. Same for Beer, 'tis nasty as well, I do not see how someone can stomach either.

Good luck with not melting your floors. XD

[gamer0004]

I spent about two hours yesterday meticulously mixing and stiring things together while attempting to keep everything as sterile as possible

Bad idea. Add many different sorts of crap to the mixture and see which one works best. It's what the French do, I believe, and people like French wine.

[Xesum]

If only I could show off my excellent French Accent.

[Trestkon]

High class forum members ftw

[spyhopping]

Well I've accidentally fermented some orange juice once or twice.

I'd love to try wine making. A friend of mine grows blueberries on their farm and makes a gorgeous fruity wine from them. It usually has a fairly high level of alcohol, but you can hardly taste it because of all of the flavor. You have to be careful not to treat it as a fruit juice and get unintentionally merry though

[justanotherfan]

I've some used equipment, and a kit, but I haven't done it yet. Part of the problem is that it's Riesling, and I've been off drinking dry riesling for years.

Anyway, I did help in making red wine a couple times. It needed some kind of wooden grit to "oak" it, and I'm sure there was something else (red grape skins?), but it resulted in this gritty disgusting mixture. It had to be pumped through filters to get the grit out. Even then there was some that would mostly settle to the bottom. The filters had to be porous, so there was red wine dripping from them.

[DDL]

I've made beer before (the quick n crappy way) and my dad makes beer all the time (the slow and tasty way). When it works, it's surprisingly tasty. When it works well (that'd be my dad) it's incredibly tasty, coz you can tweak everything to your preferences (like goldings hops? Add more!). When it works..."a bit", it's still drinkable*, but when it doesn't work...well..have you ever drunk paintstripper? I wouldn't recommend it.

Wine could be trickier, and WHITE wine? Hmmm...I'm gonna put my two canadian dollars** on the 3:2 "paintstripper" favourite. Sorry.

Course, if it works: yay! Though let's be honest: you'll be drinking it whatever the outcome, right?



*I will, as probably previously noted somewhere, drink nearly anything, so take this with a pinch of salt.

**With the current GBP exchange rate, this is about the cost of a south london mortgage..

[Trestkon]

I've made beer before (the quick n crappy way) and my dad makes beer all the time (the slow and tasty way). When it works, it's surprisingly tasty. When it works well (that'd be my dad) it's incredibly tasty, coz you can tweak everything to your preferences (like goldings hops? Add more!). When it works..."a bit", it's still drinkable*, but when it doesn't work...well..have you ever drunk paintstripper? I wouldn't recommend it.

Wine could be trickier, and WHITE wine? Hmmm...I'm gonna put my two canadian dollars** on the 3:2 "paintstripper" favourite. Sorry.

Course, if it works: yay! Though let's be honest: you'll be drinking it whatever the outcome, right?



*I will, as probably previously noted somewhere, drink nearly anything, so take this with a pinch of salt.

**With the current GBP exchange rate, this is about the cost of a south london mortgage..

I've heard that it can be really finicky, so I'm just going to try and keep everything clean. However, you are indeed correct that I shall drink whatever the result is, no matter how paintstrippery. If it works out well I plan to try red wine, then maybe beer or whiskey. And then if that all goes well maybe I'll try making some from an actual recipe instead of a kit.

I've been away for the weekend and just checked the mix, it seems to be fermenting nicely, what more could I want!

[justanotherfan]

After talking to a rather large number of people that make their own wine (and tasting it!) I've decided to give it a go.

You've inspired me to finally look into this again. I looked through the equipment I have, and inventoried it. Aside from the beautiful ~6-gallon glass bottles and the crazy corking plier/plunger, all of my equipment is disgusting plastic. One of the containers, once I opened it, made the room stink of plastic and rubber off-gassing. It smelled like a cheap sex toy shop. I'll need to replace that equipment with glass and stainless steel, and I'm missing a hygrometer, a labeled graduated cylinder (mine's plastic and unlabeled?), chemicals, and corks. I've only started reading some of the old papers, and they have scary terms like Sulphite, Isinglass, Bentonite, Vinerom, and Sterilex. I don't want wine that'll Sterilexize people.

I'm just reading an old used kit's instructions, so I'll read my unused kit's soon. I think I'll skip filtration, since I'm making a homebrew white wine, not a oaked red vintage. I hope they sell good synthetic corks for homebrew, and that they've improved on the siphoning method I saw of "suck on this tube". I'll check out what's available in my local stores...there's four of them that I know of within a 5km radius.

I'd probably like brewing beer better. There's lots of home systems that do a lot of the work automatically, but they cost a lot. The main thing that puts me off of brewing beer is anticipating the manual instructions, since beer making is filled with archaic old-english terms, like mash, wort, hefe, grist, bung, lauter, tun, sparge, and that's just the crazy ones I know of.

[Trestkon]

Welcome to the home brew club!

I'm actually using a plastic carboy, but it's a nice quality one and according to the wine store guy the current plastic carboy's are just as good as the glass ones. Of course, an older plastic carboy is likely to be not so great.

My primary fermentation is going a bit slowely as I'm keeping it in my slightly cool basement, but I may be ready to do the first racking tonight. I'm thinking about picking up a heating belt, which keeps things about 4 degrees warmer than the room temperature and should speed things along a bit.

[Dead-eye]

I chose to start with was a Pinto Grigio, mostly because my girlfriend likes it...

If I had a girlfriend I would totally make her wine...

Yeah I was thinking about making my own root beer once, not quite the same but I wanted to give it a go. Sadly I'm under age (21 in the states) and root beer has a 0.5% alcohol content so the guy would not sell me the kit.

[Jane_Denton]

After talking to a rather large number of people that make their own wine (and tasting it!) I've decided to give it a go. I dropped by a local store yesterday and picked up a starter kit that came with all the doodads and a box of juice/addatives. I'm not really a wine connoisseur but I do enjoy it, and when the price per bottle is going to be something like $2 I don't think I can go wrong (unless I really screw it up). The wine I chose to start with was a Pinto Grigio, mostly because my girlfriend likes it and I'm fairly indifferent to what type of wine I'm drinking.

I spent about two hours yesterday meticulously mixing and stiring things together while attempting to keep everything as sterile as possible and agonizing over the idea that any screwup could result in ending up with a vat of vinegar in four weeks. The 23 liters of mix (hopefully...I kind of forgot to mark the exact 23 liter mark, so I had to estimate :p) is currently sitting in my basement and hasn't yet exploded or melted through the pail, so things are going well!

Does anyone else make their own wine? Perhaps I can poach some helpful hints.

My brother in law makes a lot of wine. He's specializing in fruit wine lately Raspberry is one of them. Some people like dry wine but if you like sweeter wine why not try making some fruit wine? I didn't even notice the difference between the store bought and the homemade when I first tasted his wine. He didn't tell me he made it until after I finished my first glass.

[Xesum]

Apricot wine would be cool.

[justanotherfan]

I keep thinking I'd enjoy fruit wines. I can't find it in stores though. Our perry is "pear cider", an apple juice with pear flavouring. Some strawberry wine I bought tasted like perfumed acetone. Gekkenan plum wine (should be Californian) was like a fortified port made into a sugar syrup. I bought some sake mixes with fruit (flavourings?); I tried the lychee one, and I like lychee a lot (fresh or canned), and sake is a favourite, but I took them all back the next day. My family had made some real fruit wines many decades ago, and there is delicious hard apple cider in Canada. If the white wine is enjoyable, I'll definitely try it.

I bought a thermometer and hygrometer. Went to two stores, and was told that glass was the old way of doing things. Now everything in amateur wine making is plastic. One guy suggested medical supply stores, but I'll be phoning around, and I saw some glass stuff online. Also, they have synthetic corks, but they need a special 50$ floor-standing tool.