Have you ever made wine at home from fruit?
How successful was it? Do you have any tips for how to do it, especially how to make sure the gases in the bottle don’t expand and explode it in the kitchen?
Tagged with: gases
Filed under: All Things Wine
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I’ve vinted for a few years. You might want to start with a book by Berry, First Steps in Home Wine Making. That will hand-hold you through the process. Some of the recipes are pretty good. I am especially fond of potato and lemon wines.
To avoid bottle-bombs, place an air-lock in the mouth of your fermenter. They only cost a couple of dollars at your local home-brew shop. Some people use a balloon or condom to replace the air-lock. The important thing is to prevent contamination from airborne yeasts and bacteria.
Fruit no, honey yes. I’m chea… frugal and practical. I bottle in 2 liter pop bottles and crack the cap every week or so to release excess carbonation.
Plum wine is fairly easy and can be rather good! You need to get a good carboy for the wine and make sure you get a bung that has a bubbler in it to release the gases of fermentation. Find a good home wine making supply store in your area that can help you out with this stuff. There are also a ton of good books you can get online.
Good luck!
you buy this big 5 gallon container and this tube thing (i forget what its called, but i bet if you search wine making you’ll find it). It has to sit in the jug for a year. We just made some out of grapes that we grew and its been sitting for 6 months. We poured some out at it tastes so good. So it takes a long time. You can find wine making classes near you. There is one near us and they provide all the materials and you make it. Look for a place like that. Good luck.
I have made wine from cherries and also from oranges (orange wine sounds strange but if you do it right it’s very much like grape wine!)
There are lots of books on home winemaking. You start with a 5 gallon ‘wastebasket’ in which you mix your fruit (crushed), water, sugar and yeast. You let that ferment for a few days, and then you put it in a carboy (a 5-gallon bottle) with a lock that allows gas to escape by bubbling through water, but not for air to come back into the bottle. After another week or so you ‘fine’ the wine by mixing in a powder that grabs all the impurities (particulants) and pulls them down to the bottom. Then you bottle the wine.
If you do it right, you won’t have bottles exploding because the fermentation is finished and the fining removes the yeast (and even if there was some yeast in the bottle, it ferments to the point where the alcohol level is such that it won’t ferment anymore, and that’s what you did in the carboy.)
Some ways of making beer or root beer, you do have fermentation in the bottle, so some bottles might explode. When I was a kid we used to get Hires Root Beer extract and make root beer at home. For root beer, you mix it up in the kitchen and bottle it immediately and ALL the fermentation is done inside the bottle. So you do lose 5-10% of the bottles, you have to let them age outdoors. We used to hear them going off in the middle of the night.
Homemade fruit wine can be very good! You don’t need 5 gal. of fruit juice to make 5 gal. of wine. For nearly any kind of fruit, you can use -some- fruit and make up the rest with sugar, and it comes out lighter, more like grape wine. It’s not hard to do if you follow the instructions and make sure everything is scrupulously clean.
Hello
Yes lots
I used to make it in 1 gallon glass Demi Johns, With Air locks which fit in the rubber bungs to fit the DJ.
When Ready to bottle a Full DJ will make 6 standard bottles. Best advice get a decent Filter, they last for years and you can taste the difference.
I used to have over a hundred bottles in the garage, All gone.
Andy C
I’ve been making and mead (fermented honey) for several years now. The most important thing to remember is sanitation. Everything that comes in contact must be cleaner than clean. After that, everything else is pretty easy–though making wine takes a long time.
To prevent any explosions from the fermentation gasses, you attach airlocks atop of the fermentation vessels.
Pick up a book on home winemaking before you start. It would be a shame if something went wrong with your first batch.