Hydrometer

A hydrometer is where it starts getting scientific, and I would be remiss if I didn't point out that many people brew perfectly good wines without one. A hydrometer measures the density of water, sugar increases density, alchohol decreases it. Thus you can measure at any point what is going on with your ferment. We will mention the hydrometer again later, but we have a separate article on the hydrometer here

The Log Book

Once you have started making a few batches of wine, remembering what time scale each is working on, and what to do next, is going to be difficult. I have a log book with a page each for each of my wines. This allows hydrometer readings to be logged, along with corrective actions, notes, dates of rackings and of course taste!

Racking

From the initial bucket to the fermenter, from fermenter to fermenter - or finally into the bottles! - racking is something you will do a lot of. Racking is done by syphoning through plastic tubing available from your homebrew stockist.

You will see that you can get a tap, and also a tube with an inverted end that helps you avoid syphoning sediment. Both of these are pretty essential. You may find it handy to have a bigger bore tube and a manual pump as well, to achieve a quick racking of the wine, but the one above is better suited for the bottling phase.

Corks and Stoppers 

You will need corks or reusable plastic stoppers at the bottling phase. If you use corks then a simple hand corking device is used. Corks are cheap and most people think they make for a better presentation of the finished bottle.

Keeping things sterile

Before we get on to the process of wine making, no primer on the subject would be complete without dire warnings of your wine turning to vinager, if allowed to get within a yard of a bacteria. Ordinary kitchen standards of cleanliness are not enough and your homebrew shop will sell you many useful products to ensure that all your equipment is clean and sterile.

How true is all this? Well possibly the only way to find out for sure is to get sloppy enough to ruin a batch of wine! As such this subject runs mostly on hearsay. But keeping things sterile with boiling water and cambden tablets or other sterilising agents is not a hard chore. So why risk it?