There has never been a better time to start making your own home made wine - it is easy to do, the range of wine kits available is growing all the time and there is much help and advice available for the budding wine maker all over the internet. It is also very 'of the moment'. What I mean by that is there is a big movement towards a more natural lifestyle at the moment, people are fed up of the pre-packaged and mundane. In fact there is a movement back to a more simple natural lifestyle, in tune with the seasons and the natural world. Our grand parents and great grandparents would have most likely made their own wine with the seasonal glut of fruit or known someone who did. With the explosion of interest in growing your own fruit and vegetables and even foraging for wild produce, led by TV programs and celebrity chefs like Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall, there has never been a better time to think about making your own wine to enjoy yourself or give away as a present (Note - you can't sell wine you produce yourself without paying duty and meeting various legal requirements, and while we're on the small print - if you are foraging wild for fruit or the like, make sure you have the landowner's permission to be doing so). Also - making your own wine is CHEAP, and if you enjoy a glass or two with your evening meal making your own makes a lot of financial sense in these recessionary times.
But - whilst making wine at home is really not rocket science, it can be a bit tricky for a complete beginner to start from scratch making fruit wines from the fruit with no experience. This is of course where the wine making kit comes in and provides an easy route for the would be home wine maker to produce very acceptable and enjoyable results. A wine kit is probably the ideal way to start making your own wine. You can buy a wide variety of wine kits, from fruit wines to wines making use of specialist varieties of grapes that replicate wines you may buy. Red wine, white wine, rose wine - all can be made easily at home with wine kits. So, what do you need to get started? Well apart from the wine kit itself, you will need a minimum amount of equipment, the basics of which are:
- A food grade plastic fermenting bucket.
- A glass carboy / demijohn large enough for the amount of wine you are producing.
- A bung for this, fitted with an airlock
- A length of plastic tubing or a syphon.
- A hydrometer with glass measuring cylinder is useful to judge the wine's fermentation.
- Bottles to bottle the wine, corks or plastic corks.
- Sterilisation tablets or the like to make sure everything is completely sterile before use (or your wine may go off).
- You can even get heat-shrink caps for the top of the bottle for that professional look, and labels too.
- Your chosen wine kit.
There are of course complete beginner kits available with all the equipment you need to make your wine, and these make a sensible buy for the budding wine maker - some examples are shown here and at the bottom of the page.
 WINE MAKING STARTER KIT CABERNET SAUVIGNON RED WINE £19.45 |
 Cider Making Equipment Full Starter Kit for 23L 5 Gal Homebrew Beer Lager Wine £49.99 |
 Home Wine Making Starter Kit Superb Quality £40.99 |
 BelVino Rose Homebrew 30 Bottle Wine Making Starter Kit £56.95 |
The wine kit will come with comprehensive instructions, but the basic process is to add the grape juice concentrate from the kit to the fermenting bucket, mix with the correct quantity of water and add the yeast from the kit. Cover, and keep in a warm place while it starts to ferment (fermentation is the process where the yeast turns the sugars in the juice to alcohol). After about a week, the wine can be syphoned into the glass demijohn, the airlock fitted and it can be left to ferment for longer - the gas given off by fermentation (carbon dioxide) will bubble up through the water in the air lock. When the fermentation is complete, 'fining' agents can be added to clear the wine - helping the sediment sink out of it to the bottom. After a while the wine can by syphoned out (or 'racked') into another container and left to clear some more, before being eventually racked into bottles. Most wine kits aim to get to this point in about four weeks. If you can follow a recipe in the kitchen, you can make wine.
Making wine from a wine kit is rewarding and usually trouble free, provided you follow the instructions and take good care on the cleanliness of your wine making equipment. Oh and resist the temptation to drink the wine too soon, unless you like that 'young wine', very fruity and maybe rough around the edges taste you can get from a new wine. As long as you take care with bottling a wine made from a kit will improve with age just as its commercial counterpart does.
So - give it a go - its is a fun and rewiring hobby. We've listed lots of different types of kit that you might be interested in in the side bar (including red wine kits and white wine kits), and I've included the full beginner's wine making kts on this page for you to look at.
Wine should breathe a little, but not overnight. Putting an end to the oxidation process, which turns a favourite Merlot into vinegar, is easy with the Vacu Vin Wine Saver. Made from high-quality rubber, which will not affect the taste of the wine, the Wine Saver uses a vacuum-style pump to release air to keep a wine fresh. And it's easy to use--just place a stopper in a bottle's neck, place the pump over the stopper, and pump air out until some resistance is felt. This process is suitable for preserving all but sparkling wines, and will save Chiantis, Syrahs and others for up to two weeks. --Madeleine Miller, Amazon.com
Yeast Nutrient Ensures Rapid and Complete Fermentation of Wine, Used in Conjunction with Any Yeast Culture, 1 Level Teaspoon per Gallon
4.98 min. | 5.0 user rating
www.benshomebrew.com or www.homebrewjunkie.com For tips and tricks go to homebrewjunkie.com, for products check out benshomebrew.com Part one covers how to boost alcohol in with your homemade wine kits,sanitizing equipment, adding additives, using 28" spoon. Empty contents of wine kit out. Contents include wine yeast, bentonite, sodium metabisulphite, isinglass and potassium sorbate. Fill 6.5 gallon carboy with 2 gallons of warm water, and add the bentonite. Stir carefully. When dissolved uncap wine juice from bag and add wine concentrate to 6.5 gallon primary fermenting carboy. Add additional corn sugar to boost the alcohol and top off with the remaining water in order to achieve 6 gallons total volume.
3.73 min. | 3.0 user rating
homemadewinekits.net Here's me going through the contents of an Winexpert kit. I've made several batches of home made wine with these home wine kits and thought I'd go through this Liebfraumilch Vintners Reserve wine kit.
