Commercially grown wine grapes have been chosen as the main wine making ingredient because of their specific balance of acids, sugars and tannins. This balance makes it easier and cheaper to get good wine. A commercial wine should notably have a pleasant aroma, nice body and colour suitable to the grape variety. It also has a notable flavour which makes it easily identified as being grape rather than a non descript ingredient. Unfortunately like most fruits, the backyard grape variety (or green grocer grape) is often too high in natural acids and too low in natural sugars to make the “best” wine. The ability to test for these inadequacies and adjust them is the difference between making a good wine and making a basic alcoholic fruit flavoured drink. Both styles do have merit for the new home winemaker however. First we select the best fruit available. For grapes this usually means picking just before the birds steal everything off the vine. We want them to ripen nicely which maximises the natural sugar and minimises the acidity. It can be worthwhile taking the time to use netting over the vines. If necessary freeze what you’ve got at any point until you have enough. I like to start with at least 5kgs of fruit to make approximately 1 gallon (4.5 litres) of finished wine. You will need to “de-stem” the grapes and hand wash them before starting. Into a clean then sterilized (10 litre) pail break the skins of the grape open to start releasing the juice. (Refer to our cleaning and sterilizing instruction sheet for more info on this procedure). Then using either your clean hands or a sterilized tool, such as a potato masher, squash up the pulp to start breaking up the fruit walls or cellulose. If your grape has seeds then don’t mash too hard as we don’t want to break the seed up. If the pail is about half full with pulp or at approximately 5 litres then add one crushed up Campden tablet (or 1 teaspoon of Potassium Metabisulphite solution at 10% strength) and if you have it add one teaspoon of Pectolase enzyme. If the pail is reasonably full at approximately 10 litres then double these doses. Clean and then sterilize a dinner plate and press this down on the pulp so that the juice covers the plate and therefore protects the pulp from exposure. Then cover the pail with its lid to keep out fruit flies and leave the pulp untouched for 12 (but not exceeding) 24 hours. This “treatment” stage of the pulp is best done in a warm environment at around 20C. The next day after treating the pulp we need to strain the resulting juice to separate it from the pulp. A fine mesh straining bag is available from the shop and will be worth the expense for its ability to cleanly separate the worthless pulp from the desirable juice. However if this is your only batch of wine then utilize cheesecloth or stocking material for their economy. Clean and then sterilize anything you are going to strain with or into. We now need to strain the juice removing as much pulp as possible as this will literally rot during the fermentation process to the detriment of our finished wine. I find it worthwhile to first process the pulp through a colander or sieve to get most of the liquid out, then strain this liquid through my mesh bag first. Then I rinse the bag out under running water to unblock it’s holes then I hang the remaining pulp up in the bag to free drain. Please try to avoid squeezing the bag as this encourages pulp to come out with the juice. If the pail is your only wine equipment to start with then place your pulp temporarily into any suitable household equipment such as plastic bowls then rinse out your pail to remove any pulp and strain back into it. It is suitable to clip the lid of the pail down to hang the bag inside, allowing it to suspend the pulp inside the bag, so it drains well but helps to protect the fruit and juice from exposure. The quicker but cleaner we do this stage the better the wine will be for it. Dispose of the pulp. For the next stage we traditionally use a 5 litre fermenting jar which is a specially made narrow neck 1 gallon glass fermentation jar (which we will fit a rubber bung and plastic airlock to after we add the yeast). Again if all you are going to have is the pail then you will need to drill the lid so a bung and airlock can be fitted to the lid and it can be used as a 2 gallon fermenter. First, try to measure how many litres of juice you have strained and pour this into a clean then sterilised fermenter jar. Next for best results we would use a simple Acid Titration Kit to measure the total level of natural acids (Tartaric, Malic or Citric) in the juice. This is measured as Parts Per Thousand of ppt. If the Acid Test shows the juice to be too high in natural acid, assuming a normal acidity range should fall not lower than 3.5 to an average of 4-5 p.p.t then we will need to reduce the acid. This can be done in 2 ways. First you can simply add a quantity of water using simple mathematics to dilute the excess. For example if it is 8 to 10 ppt then it is about two times the acceptable range we can use for drinking the wine young , so for every litre of juice you could add a litre of water to halve the excess. If it is only 6 to 7 ppt then add only 500mls of water to every litre of juice. Remember if you add a lot of water then the natural flavour, aroma, colour and body will be watered away at the same time so we will aim to to keep it to a minimum. A wine that is to be matured for a longer time can be left at a higher acidity. A second, more advanced way to reduce excess acid and maximise the flavour in the wine is to add some Potassium Carbonate. A teaspoon of this powder should drop (up to) one ppt Commercially grown wine grapes have been chosen as the main wine making ingredient because of their specific balance of acids, sugars and tannins. This balance makes it easier and cheaper to get good wine. A commercial wine should notably have a pleasant aroma, nice body and colour suitable to the grape variety. It also has a notable flavour which makes it easily identified as being grape rather than a non descript ingredient. Unfortunately like most fruits, the backyard grape variety (or green grocer grape) is often too high in natural acids and too low in natural sugars to make the “best” wine. The ability to test for these inadequacies and adjust them is the difference between making a good wine and making a basic alcoholic fruit flavoured drink. Both styles do have merit for the new home winemaker however. First we select the best fruit available. For grapes this usually means picking just before the birds steal everything off the vine. We want them to ripen nicely which maximises the natural sugar and minimises the acidity. It can be worthwhile taking the time to use netting over the vines. If necessary freeze what you’ve got at any point until you have enough. I like to start with at least 5kgs of fruit to make approximately 1 gallon (4.5 litres) of finished wine. You will need to “de-stem” the grapes and hand wash them before starting. Into a clean then sterilized (10 litre) pail break the skins of the grape open to start releasing the juice. (Refer to our cleaning and sterilizing instruction sheet for more info on this procedure). Then using either your clean hands or a sterilized tool, such as a potato masher, squash up the pulp to start breaking up the fruit walls or cellulose. If your grape has seeds then don’t mash too hard as we don’t want to break the seed up. If the pail is about half full with pulp or at approximately 5 litres then add one crushed up Campden tablet (or 1 teaspoon of Potassium Metabisulphite solution at 10% strength) and if you have it add one teaspoon of Pectolase enzyme. If the pail is reasonably full at approximately 10 litres then double these doses. Clean and then sterilize a dinner plate and press this down on the pulp so that the juice covers the plate and therefore protects the pulp from exposure. Then cover the pail with its lid to keep out fruit flies and leave the pulp untouched for 12 (but not exceeding) 24 hours. This “treatment” stage of the pulp is best done in a warm environment at around 20C. The next day after treating the pulp we need to strain the resulting juice to separate it from the pulp. A fine mesh straining bag is available from the shop and will be worth the expense for its ability to cleanly separate the worthless pulp from the desirable juice. However if this is your only batch of wine then utilize “Backyard” Grape Wine per gallon with two teaspoons as a maximum dose recommended per gallon. So you could take a juice from 6 or 7 ppt to a suitable range without any dilution of its flavour with water, or you can combine the chalk and water to reduce a much higher acid level. On the off chance the grape juice is too low in acid, under 3.5 ppt then we would add no water at all and add some granulated acid to the juice to increase this. As this is only a slim possibility we won’t cover how to increase acidity here, please contact the shop if this occurs. If the acid level is in the normal usable range of 3.5 to 5.5 ppt then add no water and use 100% pure juice to make your wine which will receive the benefit of the maximum amount of flavour, colour and aroma that the grape can supply. If you do not have a Titration Kit because you wish to keep your method more simple then we can taste a sample of the fruit used or the juice strained and make a “guess-timation” of its acid content. If it tastes tart or sharp then treat it as though it has 2 times the acid content and add a litre of water to each litre of juice. If it tastes reasonably sweet then treat it like it has only a slight excess of acid and add only a half litre of water to each litre of juice. Once we have measured and if necessary added water to our fermenter we will start to see just how much wine we are going to get from our initial quantity of fruit. As you can see “good” fruit wine using this method will make less wine but that wine will be superior in flavour. We do not want to give up quality of flavour simply to make more wine by adding water to boost it. The next step is to use a Wine Hydrometer to measure the density of the juice. This must be done after adjusting acid as any water added will reduce the natural sugars. Your wine hydrometer does not specifically measure sugar (or alcohol content). Instead it measures the “thickness” of the juice. To use; free float it in the juice in a Testing Jar and where the liquid cuts against the scale read off the number on the side. Make sure there is no pulp to affect how it floats. If we want a suitable (final) wine alcohol strength then we are probably going to need to increase the sugar content of the juice. This is best done with Dextrose (Brewing) Sugar instead of White (Household) Cane Sugar as dextrose will dissolve directly into the juice whereas cane sugar needs a lot of hot water which will throw our carefully measured acid adjustment out. Also, as the yeast prefers to consume dextrose it will ferment faster and cleaner, producing healthier alcohol for you to consume, minimising the headaches if you overindulge. However if you cannot get dextrose and the wine hydrometer reading is too low then use white sugar.
How To Make Wine