Siphon Hose — 6 Foot Not For Food Use

With this all collected, follow these steps to make your wine.

Get your juice

People starting out with home fruit wine making many times wonder how much fruit they actually need. Here is a tip I have found works – you need sufficient juice to fill the glass fermentation vessel you are using – your carboy or demijohn. Some recipes advocate watering your fruit juice to make up the amount you need, but never do this. Use pure juice and your wine will be full-flavored and satisfying to drink.

You will either press the fruit, squeeze it by hand or use an electric juicer. If squeezing by hand (soft plums for example) you will need a big stainless steel or plastic container. If you have hard fruit like apples or hard plums, and electric juicer is a good investment if you don’t own one already. You may also cut up the fruit and boil it in a little water to extract the juice, but this degrades the flavor of the final wine. If you have grapes, you may try trampling them with your feet in the established manner. Some fruits may be cut up and left to soak for a few days in a little water to extract the flavor and color from the skin.

Some fruit, like apples, throw a immense froth after juicing and you will have to siphon the juice out after the froth has risen to the top.

Note that mixed fruit wines are very successful. If you have only a few apricots but a lot of apples, mix the juice to make up your gallon.

Add the sugar

Some fruit juice, like very sweet grape juice, will not need the addition of any sugar. Most other fruit wines will need sugar to be added. I commonly add 2 pound of sugar to make up one gallon of fruit juice. If you prefer a drier wine, you may reduce this amount. This is the reason it is better to use various littler glass vessels when starting with home fruit wine making – you may vary the amount of sugar in each (record this by writing on the carboy with a felt pen); when you in the long run come to drink the wines, you will recognise which style amid dry, medium and sweet that you prefer. More sugar also means more feed for the yeast, and so more alcoholic wine at the end of the process.

Add the sugar by warming the fruit juice more or less in a stainless steel pan, and stirring in the sugar to dissolve it.

Add the yeast

Sterilize your carboy or demijohn with sterilizing solution, or boiling water. Put the sugared fruit juice into your vessel. Dissolve the powdered yeast in a little warm water and sugar in a cup, and leave it for a few minutes to activate. Then add the yeast to the fruit juice. Put your air lock on the vessel.

Fermentation of the fruit juice will have to get started soon, and you will see bubbles in the air lock. This means the yeast is converting the sugar to alcohol.

Watch and wait

Put your fermentation vessel in a warm place if possible. Ideally you must leave the wine fermenting for nine months to a year. If you drink it after only a month or two it will taste rough and poor; leaving it for in regards to a year will let it mellow out – this genuinely makes a difference. As fermentation goes on, you will detect a white layer appear at the bottom of the fermentation vessel. This is formed by dead yeast cells. You may ‘rack’, or siphon the wine into a new vessel, which stops the wine getting tainted with a yeasty aftertaste. You must do this once a month.

Bottle your wine

If the wine has not clarified, and you want it to be totally clear before bottling, leave the vessel in a very cold place for a week or so, and the clarity will have to improve.

When the fermentation has stopped (no bubbles coming through the air lock) you may bottle the wine and cork the bottle. Remember to sterilize the bottles and corks before you use them. If you will be making a lot of wine, do not forget to label all the bottles with details of the fruit, the yeast assortment employed and date of bottling. If you make a superb batch, you may then try to replicate it in following years.

Drink up!

Few persons may protest drinking a bottle at this stage. But most fruit wines are at their best up to two years after bottling, so you may put a few bottles apart until you have a lot of friends round, or have something to celebrate. There’s not one thing rather like drinking your own wine, made the way you like it!