Making home-made wine is a great way to make the most of your garden orchard. In addition to a few accessories necessary for this, the addition of sugar and the fruit itself, you will need only … time, because all the work on the production of the drink is taken by wine yeast, and then their role is taken over by the force of gravity.
Do you need specialized equipment?
The basic equipment includes glass wine, cork, fermentation tube, wine drainage tube, ready-made wine bottles. We will also need wine yeast (not to be confused with confectionery or any other).
Homemade wine from light grapes – a recipe
To make wine from light grapes you will need: 10 kg of fruit, 5 l of water, 3.5 kg of sugar, wine yeast and so-called a balloon with a fermentation tube or other container that can be sealed and into which a fermentation tube can be inserted.
Pour the wine yeast into a 0.25 l bottle and fill with lukewarm, boiled water at a temperature of about 20 degrees C in such an amount that there is free space above it, and finally mix. Cork the bottle with cotton wool and leave it for 24 hours in a dark place with room temperature. After this time, add half a teaspoon of sugar and mix. Keep the corked bottle again at room temperature for 2-4 days.
Healthy and prosperous grapes are crushed with a pestle and pour boiling water, and after 3 days, pulp. Pour the resulting juice (must) into the bottle. Dissolve 1/3 of the calculated sugar portion in boiling water and, after cooling, combine with the must (this is how the so-called settings are created). Then pour the whole into the balloon, filling it to 3/4 capacity. Then add a portion of “yeast mother” in the proportion: 30-50 cm3 per 1 liter setting (it should constitute 3-5 percent of its volume). Mix the whole thing, moving the bottle in a circular motion, as well as mixing inside with a clean, scalded spoon or a wooden spatula.
What happens next?
Close the balloon with a plug made of cotton wool, then tie it with a clean piece of cloth and put it at room temperature. Fermentation takes about 20 days. Pour the second portion of sugar into the balloon on the seventh day and the third on the fifteenth. To do this, cast a slightly fermenting setting and mix sugar in it, then pour into a balloon. The whole should be mixed and, when adding a third portion of sugar, replace the cork cotton wool plug with a fermentation tube plug. Put the balloon away for another 30 days.
After this time, remove the clarified layer of wine using a specially designed rubber gander tube or cylinder, this time full. To start removing wine, you need to suck a little liquid from the bottle, and then lower the tube into the vessel, into which it should already flow in an even stream.
Finally, cork the gander, wrap the cork with the fermentation cotton wool, and place the vessel in a room at a temperature of about 12 degrees C. After 3 months, remove the wine into clean bottles again, cork tightly, seal and store it lying down.