Grape Wine

Ok first things first, I'm assuming that you already have the necessary ingredients for making grape wine. You will need 25 LBS of grapes, 10 to 13 lbs of sugar, 5 Campden tablets (Optional), 5 tsp. Yeast Nutrient (Optional), 2-1/2 tsp. dry or 25 drops liquid Pectic Enzyme (Optional), 1 pkg. Wine Yeast You can use (Fleischman's Active Dry yeast) From your grocery store, Potassium Sorbate (Optional). The equipment that will be needed is 1-5 gallon carboy, 1-5 gallon bucket, a Hydrometer, a large serving spoon, large bowl, a siphoning hose, a potato smasher. a strainer, airlock and bung.

First of all put some grapes in a bowl and use a potato smasher to crush the grapes getting as much juice as you can. Be sure to put a strainer over a 5 gallon bucket and pour what juice you smash at a time into it. Every once in awhile through the grape skins away. Once you have all your juice collected in the 5 gallon bucket add about 2 gallons of water.

Next we need to use our hydrometer to check how much sugar is in our must. Add enough sugar so that your Sp. Gr. is about 1.098 this will give us a 12 % ABV. add the sugar juice mixture to your carboy and add more water if you need to. remember if you add more water you will need to check it again to get the Sp. Gr. Back to 1.090 add your yeast and put your airlock on. Don’t get carried away and think you can add even more sugar and make your wine stronger than our recommended 12% There are a couple of reasons, first were making wine not whiskey. 12% abv is more than enough. Second, depending on the yeast you use it can’t really tolerate living in a solution with more alcohol then that and you will be left with a bunch of left over sugar that will also ruin your wine. This is why the hydrometer is such a useful tool.

Let this set for about 3 to 4 weeks. Get a bowl and add one egg white, one cup of water and a table spoon of salt. wisp this all together and pour it in with your wine. let it set for about a week and come back and rack this bottle.

After a week rack this carboy and bottle the wine, don't try to drink the wine yet though. give this wine at very least one week of setting up in the bottles. all wine gets better with age so the longer you wait the better it will be.

Be sure to leave me some feedback in the message board if this helped you. This tutorial was written by Eric Richards.