Best Home Wine Making Practices - Avoid Mistakes
When I tried my hand at wine making many years ago, without enlisting help from friends or literature, the results were, well, horrible.
Making wine at home is easy, but only if you recognize and avoid some huge mistakes before you even start.
I'll start at the beginning.
I like to read.
That in itself is not a bad thing, however, if you are like me and sometimes fail to read the entire article before running off and trying to make wine, bad things can happen.
There was an article that mentioned the fact that wine was made many years ago, before we even knew anything about yeast or sulfates.
It was an excellent article and would have been very beneficial if I had in fact, read the whole thing.
So lesson one is this.
Just because grapes have a form of yeast on their skin, and can possibly ferment without any added chemicals, this does not necessarily make wine.
More like vinegar, fuel, something, but not what I would call wine.
Home wine making is indeed easy, but there are some steps that absolutely need to be followed.
Cleanliness is at the absolute top of my "first things to do" list.
This is a very easy, yet most essential task.
If you simply crush about 1 campden tablet per gallon of water and dissolve it completely, you can sterilize your containers, utensils, counter tops and so on with this mixture.
You will also need to sterilize your must before adding yeast to it, but be careful with this step.
Most recipes call for one campden tablet per gallon of wine, but I have learned that 1/2 of a tablet per gallon is fine.
If you add too much, your wine could end up having a bad sulfurous taste.
Another term that I became all too familiar with was "stabilizing the wine" before bottling.
It has to do with stopping the fermentation before you ram an air tight cork into the bomb, I mean bottle.
All joking aside, this is something that can be very dangerous if you are not familiar with the process.
A little knowledge goes a long way.
Making wine at home is easy, but only if you recognize and avoid some huge mistakes before you even start.
I'll start at the beginning.
I like to read.
That in itself is not a bad thing, however, if you are like me and sometimes fail to read the entire article before running off and trying to make wine, bad things can happen.
There was an article that mentioned the fact that wine was made many years ago, before we even knew anything about yeast or sulfates.
It was an excellent article and would have been very beneficial if I had in fact, read the whole thing.
So lesson one is this.
Just because grapes have a form of yeast on their skin, and can possibly ferment without any added chemicals, this does not necessarily make wine.
More like vinegar, fuel, something, but not what I would call wine.
Home wine making is indeed easy, but there are some steps that absolutely need to be followed.
Cleanliness is at the absolute top of my "first things to do" list.
This is a very easy, yet most essential task.
If you simply crush about 1 campden tablet per gallon of water and dissolve it completely, you can sterilize your containers, utensils, counter tops and so on with this mixture.
You will also need to sterilize your must before adding yeast to it, but be careful with this step.
Most recipes call for one campden tablet per gallon of wine, but I have learned that 1/2 of a tablet per gallon is fine.
If you add too much, your wine could end up having a bad sulfurous taste.
Another term that I became all too familiar with was "stabilizing the wine" before bottling.
It has to do with stopping the fermentation before you ram an air tight cork into the bomb, I mean bottle.
All joking aside, this is something that can be very dangerous if you are not familiar with the process.
A little knowledge goes a long way.