How to Make Homemade Wine

After weeks of stirring, brewing and bottling, my first bottle of wine was...

Awful.

How sad! I spent nurturing the brew, and all I had to show for it was a cloudy, sour, off-tasting bottle.

However, I've learnt a few things about how to make homemade wine since then that've made my current bottles...

Delicious.

I'll show you a few important measures that can be taken to steer your next bottle of wine away from the fate of my first bottle.

Clearing is the process by which all the particles floating around in wine - dead yeast cells, bits of pulp etc. - are removed.

It does occur naturally in most wines if left for long enough. Most solids things in the wine are heavier than the wine itself, and will thus naturally fall to the bottom of the fermenter. Yeast stays afloat by producing CO2 - when it dies at the end of fermentation, it too will fall to the bottom, along with everything else.

There is one thing sometimes present that will not settle, and this is pectin. Pectin is a molecule that comes from the cells walls of plants and fruits, and will likely be present if you're using whole fruits, or fruits with pulp. It'll grab on to floating particles, and hold them in suspension, never letting them settle.

We can use something called pectic enzyme which does one thing: it loves to eat pectin! And once the pectin goes, everything else is free to fall to the bottom.

The sediment that forms from all these falling particles is called "lees", and we need to get our wine off the lees. Wine that is left over the lees too long tends to develop off-flavours. To do this, we "rack" the wine - this is simply siphoning the wine off the lees, and into a new fermenter.

Sometimes we can be really impatient - we just want to get the wine into the bottle! In this case, we can use "finings" to help the wine clear.

Finings are substances that grab on to the floating particles and weigh them down, forcing them to fall faster, In the past, winemakers used to use egg whites, milk, and even blood as finings! Nowadays there are far more hygienic and cheaper synthetic alternatives available to buy.

One of the major causes of bad-tasting wine is inadequate sterilization.

If you don't properly sterilize your equipment and must, you risk allowing bacteria, wild yeasts and other baddies to have a drink of your wine. And when they do, they leave it full of horrible off-tastes, and may even pollute your wine with toxins!

If you're serious about learning how to make homemade wine, you need to learn how to sterilize.

And it really isn't that hard. To sterilize your equipment, you need to rinse or scrub everything with a solution of a little bicarbonate of soda mixed in warm water.

The must also needs to be sterilized, which can be easily done by dropping in one campden crushed tablet into every gallon of your must. Give it a stir, and then you can go straight to primary fermentation!

Finally, you need to make sure that your wine is sterilized before bottling. Off-tastes can develop inside the bottle too; imagine how disappointing that would be!

If you do all of this, you will have gone a long way towards eliminating off-tastes from your homemade wine!