What are the basic steps in wine making?
For example, using just grape juice or even something like cranberry juice. What are the asic steps needed and ingredients to make wine?
Tagged with: grape juice • wine
Filed under: All Things Wine
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Do not use grocery store bought juice. If it even bothers fermenting, it’ll taste rank. Secondly, do not use "brewer’s yeast" from the grocery store. It will be foul and you’ll be disappointed and wonder why homebrewers do what they do.
Now, find a quality homebrew store. Try http://www.austinhomebrew.com/ or http://morewinemaking.com/
Next, buy a quality winemaking book. Then buy quality ingredients. You want a grape concentrate from a homebrew shop unless you have access to vineyard. Then buy quality winemaking yeast. dry packet will be fine. Oh and make sure you have all the necessary hardware. I also recommend a quality homebrewing forum: http://www.brewboard.com for starters
Oh and for godssakes, please don’t add pure cane sugar to wine. The grapes have enough sugar to make alcohol and sugar does bad bad things to the flavor, never mind the hangover.
I actually made wine for the first time this past summer. I had a ton of grapes in my back yard so i picked them all and mashed them. i put two packages of dry yeast, 5 pounds of sugar, and 3 gallons of water. i mixed it all together in a giant bucket and covered it and let it sit for over a month. There are also tons of easy recipes online. You should research it really well first before you go out and buy anything. The problem I had was that I didn’t know you needed certain chemicals to stop the fermentation process. My first batch of wine was good for a few weeks then got real yeasty tasting, my second batch was explosive. the corks kept poping out and hitting my ceiling. so research well first.
Wine is spoiled juice. All else follows.
Wine is made by adding yeast to fruit juice. The yeast goes to work on the sugar in the juice, or as once said, "Yeast eats sugar, pees alcohol, and farts carbon dioxide until it dies of alcohol poisoning." After the yeast finishes its work, the wine is "racked" into bottles, corked, and aged.
The flavor you get depends on the type of fruit, the type of yeast, additives, aging, and any other number of factors.