Making wine at home can be a fun and rewarding experience. Often making wine at home is legal as long as it is not sold. Below you will find a method to obtain excellent white wine for a small fee.
Steps
Step 1. Sterilize all your equipment
Sterilizing every part of your equipment that will come into contact with your wine is a very important practice: by doing this you will eliminate foreign bacteria and obtain a better wine. There are many ways to sterilize, so choose the one that best suits your purpose.
Step 2. Pour the white grape juice into the 5 liter bottle
Close and shake well.
Step 3. Add a cup of sugar
Close the bottle again and shake well.
Step 4. Dissolve the yeast in a little warm water and add a little sugar
Step 5. When the mixture begins to foam, add it directly to the grape juice
Step 6. Close the bottle and shake
(It's important to go straight to the next point without spending too much time.)
Step 7. Uncork the bottle
Step 8. Make a few holes in the balloon with a needle
Step 9. Secure the balloon around the bottle opening
Step 10. Let the grape juice rest in a warm, dark place
Step 11. After 12 hours, bubbles will start to form
If you don't see any bubbles, start the whole procedure again from the beginning. The bubbles are produced by the yeast as it turns the sugar into alcohol. The gas will inflate the balloon, coming out little by little from the holes made. When the balloon deflates (after about 2 to 3 weeks), move on to the next step.
Step 12. After these 2 or 3 weeks, the main fermentation is over and the wine should contain enough alcohol to be bottled
You should get 5 or 6 bottles of 11-12% wine! Experiment with this recipe and find the version you prefer.
Advice
- If you want to improve the taste, let the wine rest for a month before consuming it.
- For even better taste, use wine yeast.
- This wine ferments best when kept at a constant temperature of 17 ° C for 3 weeks.
- If you use red grape juice and ferment it with this recipe, you will get rosé wine. To obtain red wine starting from grape juice, ferment it at 30-35 ° C for ten days.
- If you find you have a passion for wine making, consider buying a bubbler. These valves are specially designed for fermentation: they allow carbon dioxide to escape, while at the same time preventing air from entering. They perform the same function as the balloon, but are easier to use, more reliable and more expensive.
- For an even better wine, transfer it to a new sterilized container, making sure to leave all fermentation residues in the first container. Let it sit for another month.
- To extract the wine without the sediments, use a pourer. Otherwise you can also let it settle.
- Cleaning is essential: everything that comes into contact with the juice / wine must be previously sterilized. Use boiling water, sodium metabisulfite, or a disinfectant. Juice is a very welcoming environment for microbes and yeast, so it is important to make sure that the only "microbes" present in wine are those of yeast.
