Country Wine Making

This is the core of the matter for the downsizer, and hopefully in due course we will have at least a few sets of recipe instructions on our site.

But since a recipe archive is beyond the scope of this article, you will have to make to with some general points.

Ingredients

People can and do make wines out of practically anything, though with varying degrees of success.

Fruit Wines

These are the most common, a good elderberry wine perhaps with a touch of blackberry can develop in to a supurb vintage. But any non-poisonous fruit can be turned to wine with the addition of sufficient suger, acid, and nutrient.

Grain Wines

Rice wine is of course well known.

Root Vegetables

Other Vegetables

Extracting the Flavour

Every one knows about treading grapes, and if you are to make most Country wines, with a few honourable expections like Birch Sap wine, you will probably use one of the following processes to extract flavour.

Juice Extraction

Using a press or another form of juicer.

Boiling

The fruit is crushed, boiled, and then strained to remove the solids, when the liquid has cooled, fermentation can be started.

Fermenting on the pulp

The initial fermentation takes place on the crushed ingredients, which are strained off in the first racking.

Fermentation

The whole point of the process to turn the sugar into alcohol, the miracle ingredient for this wonder process is yeast.

The Yeast

Yeasts are everywhere, whilst one might wonder how mankind came to discover many things we take for granted, like sand becoming glass for example, it is easy to see how all cultures discovered alcohol, left to its own devices fruit and water will start to ferment.

The sheer inevitability of this process means that even now you will find recipes that require no yeast. Use such recipes at your peril, the type of yeast that is used has an effect on the flavour of wine and indeed you can buy yeasts like Tokay for specific flavours. A wild yeast however may impart a poor flavour and may not have the alcohol tolerance of a commercial yeast leaving your wine struck.

Some people do use baker's yeast, but I'd recommend a yeast designed for wine making. Laboratories have made tremendous advances in yeast, and a good wine yeast will result in much reduced fermentation times as well as a reliable result.

It is worth mentioning here alcohol tolerances which have also advanced over the years until it is now possible to find yeast such as alcotec, that can produce an incredible 20% by volume, in little more than a week.

Yeast Nutrients

Like every living thing, yeasts need to feed to thrive, multiply and do the job we want them to. They need not just sugar, but nutrients, acid and vitamins. The grape is a wonderful thing, as it provides all these itself. But our Country wines often need a little help. Appropriate acid amounts perhaps in the form of lemon juice should be a part of any recipe, but they will not always mention adding nutrient and this should almost always be done. Yeast nutrient is available from your home brew stockist and you should follow the instructions on the packet.

Vitimin B_{1 i}is also recommended, and typical wine makers use 3mg Benerva tablets at the rate of 1 tablet a gallon for fruit wines, 2 for grain, leaf and vegetable wines, and 3 for flower wines. As you might expect this follows a pattern based on the amount of help the yeast is likely to need. With a flower wine the flavour is practically all the ingredients are supplying and the yeast will need all the help it can get.

Fermenting your wine is divided into two stages, though in some circumstances you may skip the first stage.

Temperature

Yeast can only live within a certain temperature range, above 100f (38c) and you will have dead yeast, the same below 60f (15c). Opinions may differ, but I aim to keep my fermenting wine between 20c-25c and I keep a thermometer at hand to check. Finding a suitable room in the house, especially in winter may be a problem, and home brew stores tend to sell assorted heaters to keep you up to the desired temperatures.

A hotter ferment will be faster, a colder one reputedly creates better wine.

The aerobic fermentation

This is done in the fermenting bucket after you initially add the yeast, this environment allows the yeast to multiply quickly and will be a frothy fast fermentation, after this dies down somewhat and is no longer generating a protective blanket of carbon dioxide. The wine will need racking to a fermenter with an air lock.

The Anaerobic fermentation

The secondary stage of fermentation, nicely punctuated, the sound of bubbling as the carbon dioxide forces its way through the airlock. This stage of the fermentation may take weeks or months, and the wine is left basically to its own devices, checking periodically that the airlock is not running low on water. Some people will also stick a quarter of a camden tablet in the water for sterility especially with a long fermentation time.

For a high alcohol wine, sugar syrup may be added each time the fermentation slows. If you do this, then careful measurements with the hydrometer are very important.

The end of fermentation/racking

When bubbles cease to pass through the airlock, fermentation has either stuck and if you think this might be the case we have some advice here, or the sugar has all turned to alcohol, or in the case of a sweet wine, the alcohol level has reached the point where the yeast has died.

Being a forum about downsizing people here have a bit of a bias against adding chemicals to wine, but I would recommend that if you have any doubts as to whether there is a chance of fermentation restarting, then add 1 camden tablet (crushed) per gallon. Better a little sulphite than an exploding bottle!

Now is the point to rack the wine and wait for it to clear. Your wine is at a delicate stage now and prone to its flavour suffering through oxidation. So when syphoning do it fairly gently and avoid dispersing the wine down the inside of the receiving vessel. When you have finished top the vessel up with a similar wine to eliminate air space.

You now need to move the wine to a cool place, and wait for it to clear.

More racking and clearing

As the wine clears dead yeast will sediment out from the wine, leaving wine on dead yeast is not a great idea.  Thus after the initial racking it is advisable to rack again after a month or two and repeat this until the wine is no longer throwing a sediment and has cleared. Wine making is for the patient and natural clearing times of a year are not unheard of.