Wine Making

[charlie sherrill]

Does anybody here do this? If we don't get a frost tonight it looks like the muscadine arbor I put up last year may have enough fruit to make some homemade wine. I Googled up some stuff but they all want to sell you the juice and other accessories to start the stuff. I want to use my own. My mother used to make it but unfortunately I was doing other things back then to pay attention to what she was doing. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[rwsmith]

My Dad did

Does anybody here do this? If we don't get a frost tonight it looks like the muscadine arbor I put up last year may have enough fruit to make some homemade wine. I Googled up some stuff but they all want to sell you the juice and other accessories to start the stuff. I want to use my own. My mother used to make it but unfortunately I was doing other things back then to pay attention to what she was doing. Any help would be appreciated.

My Dad grew his own grapes and made wine in a little storage room in his garage. The wine he made was very good.... and very strong.

That's crummy that they don't just sell the tanks and some makings. I guess if you read up you can put something together. My Dad's 'winery' looked home made.

 

[Sprefix]

LORD!!!!! Gonna be a bunch of drunks around here...... I could go for some real 'shine. My old shootin' pard has been a bit thin for about a year. I sure miss the stuff.......He's down Memphis way and it's getting hard to come by.

 

[Ivan the Butcher]

There are several shops in Ohio and Michigan that sell supplies with or without juice. Keep checking. Just like reloading, read a book first. Your public library should have some. I've made beer, but never wine. The big glass jugs you'll need and the air locks are the same, so maybe check on brewing supplies. My best friend makes wine, and I went 50% with him on a big corker. While you are looking at equipment and supplies you can get some beer making stuff for a few dollars extra and depending on the variety, have one or two batches done before your grapes are ready. By the way you can make wine from other things besides fruit, Onion and hot pepper are often made and used in cooking. When you get bored with putting wine in bottles, you can start doing little ships! Ivan

 

[CAJUNLAWYER]

Try this method
How to make your own prison wine | Brokelyn

 

[timn8er]

Ironic...when I logged onto the Forum this morning, this thread was right above a thread titled "Drunk Driver?".

 

[sipowicz]

I have a nice Tuesday 8:30am chianti that I'll be opening this weekend!

 

[Wee Hooker]

Wine making isn't hard. All it takes is sugar, starch (fruit, etc) and yeast. Nature does the rest. What's challenging is making wine you WANT to drink and making it consistently that way.
From my ( 20 yrs- on/off) experience I'll offer the following.
- Start simple and not too big the first year or so. Your first attempts will be full of "woulda, shouda, coulda's". It will likely be decent but nothing that will ever sell at auction to put your kids through college

-The only special tools you really need are a hydrometer and a air trap or two. Covered clean(!!) 5 gal buckets or similar water bottles are all you need for first and secondary ferment until you get into larger quantities. You can empty your own wine bottles to refill. ( Yea, somebody has to do it.)
- Don't be afraid to experiment. Some of the best years dad and I had was when we ran short of a particular grape and substituted in other grapes, or apples(!). Wine making can be fun or a chore. ( Kind of like reloading)
- Take meticulous notes of what you do and when. Times, temps, hydrometer readings, volume/weight of ingredients etc. Without them your doomed from year to year to duplicate or avoid mistakes.
- Keep everything extremely clean. if you don't , and or don't use the air trap during ferment, you may end up with a 10 year supply of wine vinegar.

 

[shouldazagged]

Can't do it. I cook with wine and beer, but drinking makes we want to go hang-gliding in elevator shafts and make passes at ladies whose husbands collect and carry .44 Magnum revolvers. And are due home any minute.

I've never actually done the first, but did the second. I have no idea why I'm still alive.

 

[ACP230]

There is a lot of wine making info on line. The food co-op in the next'
town over + one has supplies and several books with recipes.
We bought one of the cheaper books but it has a lot of info in a few
pages. It's entitled "Winemaker's Recipe Handbook."

A Net site with a lot of printable recipes on it is "The Winemaking Home Page."

We've made wine for the past few years, and made a little many years ago. Some we have made is apple, blueberry, dandelion, orange mead, strawberry, sugarplum, and rhubarb. I figure I can get
grape wine from the store. If I had grapes growing in the yard
I'd probably feel differently. Since I don't, I like to pick stuff in the wild,
for free, and make wine out of it.

 

[Wee Hooker]

There is a lot of wine making info on line. The food co-op in the next'
town over + one has supplies and several books with recipes.
We bought one of the cheaper books but it has a lot of info in a few
pages. It's entitled "Winemaker's Recipe Handbook."

A Net site with a lot of printable recipes on it is "The Winemaking Home Page."

We've made wine for the past few years, and made a little many years ago. Some we have made is apple, blueberry, dandelion, orange mead, strawberry, sugarplum, and rhubarb. I figure I can get
grape wine from the store. If I had grapes growing in the yard
I'd probably feel differently. Since I don't, I like to pick stuff in the wild,
for free, and make wine out of it.

Good point. Wine making isn't just about grapes anymore. I've also made small batch's of most of those you mention plus some other cheap /free starters like banana, pear, roses, grapefruit , beach plumb, and cranberries. Some were good, some a waste of good sugar. All were fun.

 

[ACP230]

There's a muscadine wine recipe on the "Requested Recipes" part of
Jack Keller's wine site.
Address, winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques15.asp.

Also a couple of generic grape wine recipes under grape wine on a
different section of the site.
HTH.

 

[carpriver]

While on an extended TDY to Saudi Arabia the guys in my duty section made wine from Welsh's Concord Grape Frozen Concentrate 5 lbs.of sugar some bread yeast and bottled water. We mixed everything in a 5 gallon Iglo cooler. We drilled a hole in the top sealed in some surgical tube in the hole an ran the tube into a half full bottle of water. The cooler was placed inside a OD green shipping container to ferment for about 7-8 days. Poured it thru a coffee filter into the water bottles. We had to drop in a couple drop of lime juice to stop the fermentation. It tasted ok and it was pretty strong.

 

[loutent]

Tried it a couple times - more trouble than it's worth - you never get a really good wine but it does have some alcohol and yeast - nothing like even a cheap California chard that would run $5/750ml - try the Mondavi "Woodbridge" chard - about $9/1.5 liters at Costco - can't beat it for the price.

 

[Moonman]

Charlie,

Wash your feet before you STOMP THE GRAPES.

That is unless you want a more EARTHY tasting wine.

 

[1morethan8]

We've have a winery just up the road a ways. They make both muscadine & scuppernong very well.

I've never made wine.. well, it didn't stop there, it went on to become brandy.
Yeah.. you can make wine and beer, but you can't distill...
legally. I guess they think the mountain people should write them a check!

 

[tputto]

Siphon is your friend. Once the fermentation stops, siphon the wine into another bucket to get rid of the sediment. Allow to stand overnight and do it again. That stuff on the bottom is nasty and will spoil the taste of your wine. It will also give it a yeasty smell.