Home winemaking

Ever wonder how to make homemade wine? This may not be a frugal post, but it is something that is one of my hobbies. With saving so much money by couponing, we are able to do a few things that we may not otherwise have been able to. Shaun and I have now completed 2 wine kits. The last kit we did, we documented each step with pictures. Making wine is really easy and it is a lot of fun!

This time we made a Chilean Chardonnay. We used the juice concentrate as opposed to using grapes (we're not that advanced yet).

We started our wine on 3/6/10. The first step is to heat up water. We use distilled water, that you can buy at the grocery store. Since we are on well water, we don't want to risk any of the minerals in our water affecting the taste of our wine.
Next, we put the water in our primary fermenter. Then we slowly added bentonite, and stirred vigorously to avoid clumping. Bentonite removes protein from the wine.

Next, we added our juice concentrate to our primary fermenter.

Chow wanted to help.

Then, we added some water to the empty juice bag, to get the rest of the yummy juice concentrate out.

And added it to the primary fermter.

Then we topped off the fermenter to 6 gallons with more water.

And stirred vigorously to mix everything up.

Then we had to check the specific gravity of our mixture. So I collected a sample.

We placed our hydrometer into the sample.

And read our measurement. Our specific gravity here was 1.087. The measurement should be between 1.080-1.100, so we were good to go.

Since we were making an oaked Chardonnay, our next step was to add our packet of oak chips.

And then stirred it up.

Next, we needed to take to the temperature to make sure it wasn't too warm or too cold for our yeast. Yeast like a temperature between 65-75°F. Notice how Thai was now helping.

Next, we sprinkled the yeast onto the surface. No mixing necessary. Yeast, go to work! This is going to be wine??

Our setup for the next 5-7 days.

7 days later, on 3/13/10, we took a sample and checked the specific gravity. It read 1.002. We were looking for a measurement of 1.010 or less. Since our measurement was acceptable, we racked our wine into another carboy.

And this was our setup for 10 more days for secondary fermentation.
10 days later, on 3/23/10, we took a sample of our wine...

Added the hydrometer...

And read the measurement. Our specfic gravity was 0.992. We wanted a measurement of 0.996 or less.

The next day, 3/24/10, we took another sample and verified that the specific gravity read the same number. Since it did, we proceeded with the next step. We dissolved metabisulphite (a preservative) and sorbate (stabilizer that prevents any new yeast from forming) in cool water.

Then we added the mixture to the carboy.

And mixed vigorously to drive off CO2 gas.

Then we added an isinglass clarifier (a fining agent which helps to clarify the wine).

And mixed vigorously again, to drive off CO2 gas.
Then we topped the carboy within 2" of the bung with cool water.

Our setup for 8 days.

Since we want to age our wine for more than 6 months, we need to add additional sulfites so that the wine doesn't spoil. So, 8 days later, on 4/1/10, I made a solution by adding potassium metabisulphite to cool water.

Then we racked the wine into another carboy.

And added the sulfite solution.

And mixed vigorously.

Then we topped the carboy again with cool water.

Our setup for 14 days (we let it sit here longer, since we were out of town).

On 4/24/10, we were ready to bottle, so we cleaned and sanitized 30 wine bottles.

We aren't sure if there will be a noticeable difference between filtered and unfiltered wine, so we are doing both. Here, Shaun bottled some unfiltered wine.

This is the filter. You have to soak the discs in water, so you must discard the first output from the filter.

A closer look at the filter.

This is the wine to be filtered.

Then we bottled the filtered wine.

Next, we had to put the corks in. So we soaked the corks in water to lubricate them.

And then used our handy dandy corker.

And voila!

Our finished product. They will be stored upright for 3 days, and then we'll lay them on their side. It is good to age the wine for at least 1 month, but it will be even better if you let it age 3-6 months (or more).

We can also calculate the 5 of alcohol in our wine by using the following formula:

(starting specific gravity-final specific gravilty)/0.0074

In our case:

(1.087-0.992)/0.0074=12.84% alcohol

If you consider the cost of the juice kit (which comes with all your additives), corks and bottles, it works out to be $4.41/bottle.

But, since we didn't have to buy the bottles (we reused old ones that we've been saving for a while), our cost works out to be $3.39/bottle.