Winemaking Tips/Tricks

HOW TO THROW A KILLER SUMMER BASH

Velvet dreams.

Description: Drink in moderation. Ingredients: Any fruit in a keg This recipe restores 50 energy and 20 health on standard quality, and sells for 3x the base price of the fruit used. It induces the buff Tipsy, which reduces Speed by 1.  Difficulty: Medium, 7 months, give or take. One kit makes ~25 bottles. 

This recipe will show how to make wine from a kit. You’ll need some equipment to go with the kit, but all the ingredients you need generally come with it.  Equipment: An open carboy, at least two closed 23L carboys, airlocks, a hydrometer, a siphon hose with a filter and a spring-tip bottle filler, potassium metabisulphite (a sterilizer), a heat-controlled room or other method of keeping the carboys at a steady temperature (I’ve heard of people use heating blankets).

This will be an info-dump, I apologize in advance.  Mix 1 tbsp potassium metabisulphite (K2S2O5) with about half a litre of water. Rinse out an open carboy and then disinfect it with the sterilizer. Rinse again to remove any chemical left so as not to kill the yeast. Pour in the grape juice from the kit. Add enough warm water to fill the carboy to 23L, ensuring the water is between 68°F to 75°F. Follow the instructions in your kit for any additives, and stir them in with a big spoon. We only add the bentonite, yeast, and oak chips [for red wine], the rest isn’t as necessary. 

Place the carboy in 72°F room (or there abouts). It may absorb cool temps from the floor, so keep it above ground on a bench or something. Before adding the yeast, measure with a hydrometer to get the specific gravity. If it reads 0, there’s no sugar in your juice and it will make vinegar. Get a refund. Sprinkle the yeast on the juice and place the lid on. No need to airlock yet; it’s producing so much gas that nothing can get in. Check the day after to ensure it’s fermenting. Let it sit for 5-7 days. 

Most of the foam should be gone after a week, as the yeast has eaten all the sugar. A hydrometer will read close to 0 at this point. Sterilize a closed carboy with K2S2O5, and rinse. Sterilize and rinse a siphon tube with a filter on the end. Siphon the juice from the open carboy to the closed carboy. Leave the sediment in the open carboy and put an airlock on the closed carboy, filling to the line with water. Let it sit for about a month, topping up the airlocks every week or as needed. Don’t try drinking it yet, it’s gross. 

Sterilize and rinse another closed carboy, along with the siphon tube. Siphon the wine from the full to empty carboy, leaving sediment in the first one. This process is called “racking”, and you should do it every month for the next 6 months. We do lazy wine-making and only rack twice, but then we deal with more sediment at the end. Top up any lost wine with a bit of water in the newly-filled carboy. Don’t remove the airlocks except when racking. (Below the yellowish carboy hasn’t settled yet, it’ll look like the orangeish one beside it later)

After about 7 months, the wine is ready for bottling. Technically, you can add a couple tablespoons of the K2S2O5 to the wine and stop the fermentation and bottle a few months earlier, but we don’t like sulphites in our wine, so we just let it finish the fermentation process on its own. Wash about 30 bottles in hot, sudsy water, scrubbing out the inside with a wire brush to get rid of any tannin stains, and rinse them well before setting them aside to dry. We have a fancy rack for it, but a regular dishrack is fine. Once they’ve all been washed, rinse the inside of the bottles with some K2S2O5 and let them dry for an hour. 

Prepare the corks by setting 30 of them in a pot of water. Place a plate over top the corks to submerge them. Put the pot over high heat until you just start to see bubbles form, and then turn off the heat and let them sit. While they’re absorbing the hot water, sterilize the siphon tube with a filter on one end and the bottle filler on the other. The bottles will fill quickly; it takes about 20 seconds to fill one with the siphon, so watch it closely. Leave some liquid at the bottom of the carboy so you don’t get sediment in a bottle. 

A manual corker works great, but if you have another method, by all means. Drain the water from the pot and cork the bottles. Keep them upright for 24 hours. The corks need to dry out and expand before they can be shelved. 

Some notes: These are super basic guidelines for simple wine-making. My family has cut a lot of corners over the years from experience and it still turns out great, but if there’s any discrepancies between my instructions and your kit instructions, follow the kit. Sterilize and rinse everything! Don’t cork screw-top bottles, just put the lid on and drink those ones first. Also, I’m by no means a professional but not exactly a moonshiner either, and I apologize that this Artisan Good isn’t as simple with regards to equipment. 

Winemaking is a lot of fun but requires a lot of patience. Once done, a bottle will cost about $1-2. We made four batches with about 120 bottles in total. Oh, and drink responsibly!