Not long ago, if you wanted to create your own bottle of succulent red or crisp white wine you would need to buy a vineyard in Tuscany or the Napa Valley. With the wide availability of grapes, equipment and winemaking information available today, all you need is a few hundreds dollars, some space, and a little spare time.
The basics of winemaking are pretty simple: crush some grape into juice, ferment the juice, strain it, store it, bottle it, and stick a cork in it.
Grapes are available year-round, and winemaking supply stores even sell bottled grape juice made specially for making wine at home. The other ingredients are sugar and yeast.
The basic equipment for winemaking consist of a glass wine carboy, a cork, and a glass tube.
The first step in the process is destemming the grapes in order to have a clean fruit. Then you are ready to crush the grapes. You can march around barefoot in a vat filled with the grapes, if you like, or use a juice extractor. The objective is to separate the skins, seeds, the pulp of the grapes.
Mix the extracted grape juice with sugar and yeast. Pour the ingredients into a carboy and wait for about 6 weeks for the fermentation process do the job.
Zymurgy
Zymurgy (or zymology) is the study of fermentation. The word was originally used to describe the science involved in these processes but it has since become more broadly used to describe the brewing of alcoholic beverages. A zymurgist (or zymologist) is one who studies zymurgy.
Red Winemaking
The first step in making a red wine is to have the grapes perfectly ready to be picked. They need to be picked not only at the proper time in their life cycle, but also at the right time of day to ensure the acids and sugars are all at the right balance for the wine. Click here.
Brewing Cheap Wine
As the title says, this is cheap wine. This hobo-wine is certainly not for connoisseurs. For those who do not expect quality, but want to try an enjoyable, cheap, and easy educational project, this instructional page on wikiHow explains how to make an inexpensive wine at home. All you need is some unconcentrated varietal grape juice, basic winekeeping equipment and an undiscriminating palate. Click here.
Winemaking Defined
Winemaking, or vinification, is the production of wine, starting with selection of the grapes or other produce and ending with bottling the finished wine. Although most wine is made from grapes, it may also be made from other fruit or non-toxic plant material. Mead is a wine that is made with honey being the primary ingredient after water. The science of wine and winemaking is known as oenology (in American English, enology). Wikipedia