anyone making wine?

[Ghooge2008]

I searched...most people are making beer here. I am interested in making homemade wine, My Grandfather made wine from the berries he grew...blackberries, elderberrys, and such. He always had a glass carboy with the relief thing on top sitting around bubbeling and not much else I can remember, I am interested in a simple setup like this. I dont know much about it and have been reading online but I am pretty sure his process was simple, the wine was ok...I drank some that was syrup-y and not so great but others were tastefully good and had quite a bite!

I would like to see if anyone here has brewed wine and could give some pointers on a simple setup that produces decent-good wine, and the equipment to do it with with out breaking the bank.

[56FordGuy]

I'll be watching this thread. I homebrew beer, but I want to try some wine. The kit I bought came with the stuff to do both, I just haven't tried the wine yet due to the amount of time involved.

[Guest clsutton21]

Make some muskodine wine.

[MudBugjr]

I bought a set up but still haven't found the time to do it. There is a great store in Murfreesboro. I think its called the brew master. Been awhile. i think my setup cost me around 90$. Not including the bottles or the wine kit itself. I thought I would try a kit before I went with the fresh fruit. The kits If I remember right run around 80-90$ and make about 24 bottles. Shoot you can google it or youtube it.

[Guest Muttling]

I've been a home wine maker for many years and it's MUCH easier than beer. Beer is very touchy about the sanitizing of equipment and you have windows of time to get certain steps done. Once you get a wine out of the primary fermentor and into the secondary (the glass carboys you remember), it's actually better if you put it in th closet and forget about it for a few weeks. Later in the fermentation, you can forget about it for a few months and it will be better.

You can buy everything you need on line for $50 to $75 for equipment. They have 28 day kits which come with main ingredients and detailed instructions. The kits turn out really good wine for roughly $3 a bottle. The wine is ok after 28 days, but if you let it age about 90 days in the secondary fermentor (the glass carboys) it's really good.

My suggestion would be to make a couple of the kit batches first to get the hang of things before trying a from scratch wine and so you'll have something to enjoy fairly quickly. From scratch wines won't be any good for 1 to 2 years....5 to 7 years for a mead (e.g. honey based wine). Yes...I said YEARS.

Fruit/ berry wines aren't that difficult to make, but you have to be careful not to set them up too sweet. You want a potential alchohol of 11% before you start the fermentation and you want to ferment ALL of the sugar in the must (the juice before fermentation.) You can sweeten it to your taste after you have finished the fermentation and stabalized it to prevent refermentation. If the wine ferments to an alchohol of 14%, the yeast can't ferment any more and you will have left over sugar making the wine sickly sweet.

The two BIGGEST suggestions for improving that quality of your wine are to use RO filtered or deionized water instead of tap water for mixing the must and topping up fermentors. Tap water and especially well water will add off flavors and will push up your pH.

Speaking of pH, invest in an acid test kit and adjust the acid level of the must before you ferment. The pH of the wine is a huge factor in the flavor and it's very cheap to adjust it. (This is especially important in dry wines as the sugar in sweet wines can hide some of the off flavors caused by bad pH.)

Edited July 16, 2009 by Muttling

[Guest Muttling]

I bought a set up but still haven't found the time to do it. There is a great store in Murfreesboro. I think its called the brew master. Been awhile. i think my setup cost me around 90$. Not including the bottles or the wine kit itself. I thought I would try a kit before I went with the fresh fruit. The kits If I remember right run around 80-90$ and make about 24 bottles. Shoot you can google it or youtube it.

The top quality kits run that price, but the lower end kits also make really good wine and you can find them for $50 to $75.

If you're stingy with your wine when racking between fermentors and bottling, you'll get 26 bottles from a 5 gallon kit.

[Jasongar8]

My Dad and Grandfather make wine. They use both the kits and fresh fruit (berries and grapes) out of his garden. Im not a wine drinker by no means, none of it taste great to me, but the kits seems to turn out better. Their two favorites are blackberry merlot and calypso bianco kits made by Orchard Breezin. So thats probably where I would start with one of those.

Here is a link to the kits my Dad and Grandfather use.

Orchard Breezin

You might also want to stop by the Lil' Ole Winemakers Shop here in town, they helped my Dad and Grandfather out a lot when they were first getting started. I would buy my equipment local so you dont have to pay shipping on the big glass jugs.

Here is a link to their number.

Lil' Ole Winemaker Shoppe in Nashville, TN | 5916 Charlotte Pike, Nashville, TN

-Jason G

[Okey]

.I drank some that was syrup-y and not so great but others were tastefully good and had quite a bite!

You can control the amount of sweetness and alcohol when you make wine.

Probably the easiest and cheapest is a one gallon batch of Welches Grape wine. Probably not anything a true wine snob would like, but ok.

I can show how to get started if you don't mind driving to south Nashville. I have enough stuff to get you started.

Okey

[Guest TurboniumOxide]

Ya buncha moonshiners. (tis a nobel art making amateur alcohol.) Bet you guys reload?

[Guest Muttling]

Ya buncha moonshiners. (tis a nobel art making amateur alcohol.) Bet you guys reload?

Hehehe........I do own a lab grade, single stage distillation unit. I use it to make ports and fortified wines.

I can make hard liquors, but it requires 7 passes through my unit and isn't worth the effort. (Moon shiners run 2 and 3 stage units.)

[Okey]

I forgot to add this in my last post. Jack Keller has some good info on winemaking at his site. Winepress.us has an active forum on winemaking.

Oh yeah, I reload.

Okey

[ftncityfatboy]

wine & beer, reload as well. you can use the same equipment for both wine & beer, however, i use different fermenters. i have very good success with kits, not good success with fruits. don't know what the deal is, but i have been at it for 10 years now. still have some wine from first batch. nothing like a good homemade brew...