Homemade Wine is Not Cheap Wine, It Just Costs Less!
- Image by terriem via Flickr
Learning homemade wine making is fast becoming one of the most popular crafts/arts around the planet. There are are plenty of reasons for this.
But the biggest one, over the last couple of years, is the higher cost of commercial wines compared to homemade wines. And it is not just the higher expense of transporting that bottle of wine to you, but growing, harvesting, and fermenting costs are going up right along with the price of fuel. Do not be surpirsed if in the near future you see bottles of wine at the local grocery and wine stores double.
Accompanying the desire to produce one’s own vintage, a flurry of “How To make Wine” guides have cropped up around the internet. All of the guides are helpful and, at least, can get a beginner started.
The truth is, you can make high quality wine, award winning wine, at home, in a 5 gallon food bucket. If you know what you are doing…
Some preparation and materials are required. You have to, at least, have a hydrometer. A hydrometer is used to gauge the fermentation progress by measuring the conversion of sugar to ethanol by yeast. You need a large container such as a 5 gallon bucket. AND – you need some kind of near air tight secondary fermentation vessel. In the industry we call this a “carbouy” sometimes this is spelled carboy.
Add to these basic pieces of equipment some very inexpensive airlocks and plastic tubing and you are ready to become a winemaker. Almost…
You will need a strain of winemaking yeast (a dormant microbe). And you will need such chemicals as citric acid, potassium sorbate, metabisulfate, campden tablets, pectin enzyme and a few others.
By the way here is my wine making tips in home wine making is: Get the good stuff – by that I mean, the good grapes to start with. How do you do that?
There are actually vineyards that will sell small quantities of grapes or even crushed grapes and juices, fresh from the vineyard. Although these are hard to locate, they do exist. I have found at least one wine making guide that lists these sources. Visit How-to-make-wine.net, you will find an excellent wine making guide that includes sources for vineyard grapes.
If you have developed a taste for the finer things in life such as a glass of wine here and there, don’t let the higher prices of commercial wines stop you. Make your own home made wine. Aside from the money savings (you can make wine for about 25 cents a bottle), there is the actual enjoyment and challenge of making something that you can drink! Being self-sufficient in this way is amazing. And if your batch comes out really good, you will be calling all your neighbors and friends to come and give it a try.
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