Making wine, not from a kit

[srkaeppler]

Hey All-

I posted on here a couple of weeks ago about making wine from a kit. I have been rethinking that for a couple of reasons. That being said, I am wondering what people would recommend for making wine for the first? Would you recommend a kit? Or is it better to use a recipe? Do you have any suggestions for good recipes(thinking a red wine for the first one)? To me kits are good, but it seems to take some of the creativity and subjectivity that comes with winemaking.

Anyway, I'd love to hear some feedback!

Steve

 

[AToE]

First question would be what kind of wine you're talking about. Generally people mean grape wine when they just say wine, in which case I would in fact recommend starting with a kit unless you are very ambitious - there's not much "recipe" that goes into a grape wine, it's generally just grapes, but there are a lot of choices for yeast, temp, and overall process that can make gigantic differences in the final product and would be difficult for a newbie to handle all at once.

If you mean fruit/country wine - then I say ditch the kit and work with the people on this site to come up with a recipe that will work for you.

If you mean mead (which in many cases is the same as a country wine, you just replace the sugar addition with honey) then I still say ditch the kit and work with us folks to come up with something you'll love.

 

[Medsen Fey]

If you are starting to make wine, I'd suggest a kit. Yes, you lose a bit of the magic, but it will give you a chance to master the essential techniques - sanitizing, racking, fining, bottling, etc. while making a good wine. When you want to try a non-kit wine, you can order buckets of frozen grapes, or frozen juice (for whites), that give you more control over how they are handled. For the next step you can check with local winemaking clubs (or brewshops) because in many places, they make bulk orders of fresh grapes, and have them shipped in cold, but you have to be ready when they come.

 

[Chevette Girl]

A kit is a good way to start, it's a nice controlled environment and you know exactly what you'll get, and like Medsen said, great way to get used to the procedures... Of course, after the first one, this was far too boring for me and I'm not much on grape wines anyways so I had to start experimenting with anything else I could concievably ferment... I started with using sugar in country wines and eventually tried a mead or two, then someone turned me on to Joe's Ancient Orange and there was no looking back...

 

[srkaeppler]

Hey All-

Again thank you all for the response. For right now I am thinking about making a red grape wine. I was thinking about making recipe like this from Jack Keller's website: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques18.asp I wanted to do something like that. Again my theory is that it would allow for some more dynamic, whereas a kit you need to 'follow the directions' fairly closely. I know I posted about degasing, which seems like something you do with kit wines only (maybe I am wrong...?) Again, the first batch is more about getting the procedure down, so I thought maybe if I could find a simple, nonkit juice recipe, I could do that first, then improve on my technique.

Don't worry by the way, I am sure I will head over to mead or give that a shot as well. Wayne gave me some braggot he made while he was out here and it was phenomenally good, so I plan to at least give those a try. I am though interested in fermenting almost anything I can!

Steve

 

[fatbloke]

Hey All-

Again thank you all for the response. For right now I am thinking about making a red grape wine. I was thinking about making recipe like this from Jack Keller's website: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques18.asp I wanted to do something like that. Again my theory is that it would allow for some more dynamic, whereas a kit you need to 'follow the directions' fairly closely. I know I posted about degasing, which seems like something you do with kit wines only (maybe I am wrong...?) Again, the first batch is more about getting the procedure down, so I thought maybe if I could find a simple, nonkit juice recipe, I could do that first, then improve on my technique.

Don't worry by the way, I am sure I will head over to mead or give that a shot as well. Wayne gave me some braggot he made while he was out here and it was phenomenally good, so I plan to at least give those a try. I am though interested in fermenting almost anything I can!

Steve

That link to Jacks site....... I'd say stuff it and just make one of those from a kit.... too much hassle to do otherwise....

regards

fatbloke

 

[Chevette Girl]

If you're planning to start with juice, it's very much like a kit, you just have to make sure the sugar level is correct and go buy things separately instead of using the oak chips that come in the kit... but if you're making your own grape juice, now that's dynamic... and bloody expensive, 20 lbs of grapes for a gallon of juice...

 

[wayneb]

Finally, Steve, if you really want to go crazy and jump into winemaking with both feet, remember that I am getting a bulk purchase of St. Vincent grapes together from a vineyard there in eastern Iowa about two and a half weeks from now, so you could conceivably start with freshly crushed and de-stemmed grapes and do a traditional red wine "the old fashioned" way. However I'll be leaving town to head back to Colorado as soon as possible after picking up those grapes, so if you choose to go that route you won't have me around to watch what you're up to once you get your fermentation going! ;D

And Chevette Girl, for red wines (per one of the Moderators on WinePress.us) "It can vary but for most of our reds, we can expect that a ton of fresh grapes will yeild about 210-240 gallons of must which in turn yeilds about 120-130 gallons of finished wine. The variation comes from cluster size, stem size and ratio, amount of shatter, open vs. closed clusters, berry size, skin thickness, number of seeds, press pressure, etc." (Thanks to gregorio for that authoritative written reference.) The amount of finished wine depends a lot on the efficiency of the press (and how much you want to press), which is done once you've fermented on skins and seeds for a bit. Typically, thick skinned red varietals will end up more in the neighborhood of 100-120 US gallons of finished red wine per ton (2000 lb US ton), and the thin skinned, big berry varietals will yield more along the lines of 125-140 gallons per ton of fruit.

 

[Medsen Fey]

Using Brehm grapes is costly, but they have great fruit by all accounts. If you've got the money to take the chance, you'll be starting on a sound footing. You'll probably need 2 pails (5-gallon each) to produce 5-6 gallons of wine.