Home wine making equipment

Home wine making does not require a lot of expensive kit, but there are a few basics, and these are generally best bought from a home brew shop. It is worth making a basic point here on cleanliness. All wine making is prone to bacteriological infection, slight scratches in equipment can harbour bacteria. So be careful with false economies if buying second hand buckets and fermenters.

Fermentation Bucket

First thing you will need is a bucket:

Even if you are making wine from a kit, it is often the case that you will get better results if the wine is allowed an initial aerobic fermentation in a bucket with a lid. This first fermentation will give the yeast the best opportunity to multiply.

After the initial fermentation the wine must be racked to a fermenter with an airlock. This is a good point to talk about quantity. There are two typical quantities of wine you can make.

The Main Fermenter

The single gallon: ideal for experimental Country wine making, or for when you have limited ingredients to hand, or perhaps you love the craft so much that the time factor is not an issue. Single gallons are normally fermented in glass demijohns. A common place to get these cheaply is local charity shops. 

Five gallons: Five gallons is common as it is about the maximum one person can practically lift. Making 5 gallons takes little longer (unless you are stripping elderberries) to make than a single gallon, and the results last almost twice as long! It may be a little unnerving wondering whether a 30 bottle batch will turn out okay. But the reality is that bigger batches are more reliable. Temperature variation is a problem in wine making and 5 gallons will always be less prone to this factor.

Whilst glass is always the preferred container for fermentation, in practical terms a plastic fermenter is what you will use.

On top of your fermenting vessel, you will need some form of airlock. This prevents the wine being contaminated, during the initial fast fermentation in a bucket with a loose fitting cover, the sheer volume of carbon dioxide generated covers the wine in a protective layer. But as the fermentation slows you need to keep the wine safe by using an airlock.

One important point to note is, that unless you are exclusively using wine kits, then you will almost certainly need to rack from one fermenter to another at some point, and so you are always going to need one spare fermenter.

The one pictured above, is about the cheapest available. Larger airlocks are nicer to look at and better to use. Since airlocks cost under £1 and last forever, there really is no point in being a cheapskate.