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Posts Tagged ‘fermentation’

You cannot avoid making your own wine at home if you are a real wine buff. Wine making is easy and can be done at home without too much trouble. When you learn what processes are involved in making wine at home, you will be able to duplicate them on your own.

Equip yourself with some grapes or their concentrate and you are ready to begin making wine at home. It is excellent if you have some land to grow grapes on, because then the wine you get from these grapes will be really truly yours. Use the best quality grape concentrate because only that will provide you with a wonderful wine. You can get very high grade concentrate online, or you will have to search in a home brewing store. After grapes (or their concentrate), you will need yeast plus other requisite brewing necessaries. If this is your first batch of wine you may wish to consider purchasing a wine kit rather than buying all of your equipment separately. Once you have made your wine and assured yourself that this is a hobby you would like to involve yourself in, you can buy upgraded your wine making equipment for making larger quantities.

Depending on what you use – grapes or concentrate – there can be anything from 5 to 8 steps in wine making. Collect your grapes fresh from the vines if you want to use grapes rather than concentrate. Pull out every individual stem from the grapes that have been harvested. This is vital because the bitter tannins can give an unappealing taste to the wine.

With the stems removed, you will now have to puncture the skins of the grapes in order to extricate their juices. There are certainly many different ways in which to do this. Crushing grapes is the most popular method used by professional wine makers. The amount to which you crush the grapes will influence the taste of the wine. A wine with a fruity flavor can be obtained if you almost don’t crush the grape berries at all.

Primary fermentation is the next step you have to do. This step is the step of fermentation of the sugars in the juice by the yeast cells. You will now have carbon dioxide and alcohol but you may have to add more yeast to get the complete reaction. It is not enough to depend on the yeast found in the grapes because that will not give a stable continuous transformation and for that reason you have to add extra yeast.

Now, you have to squeeze more juice from the grapes.You have completed the step of primary fermentation, but now you can remove more juice from the fruit. You will find that the juice you get in the second stage is not of as good quality as the juice got in the first crushing stage. During the first crushing of the grapes, the free run juice that you got did not come into contact with the stems and skins of the grapes - this is what made that juice taste better. But the press juice is not worthless. Even in the large wineries, press juice is used to a great extent to improve the overall yield.

After the pressing, the wine undergoes a secondary fermentation and an aging process simultaneously. Wine makers decide according to their personal needs how long to allow their wines to ferment.

Bottling is the concluding process of wine making. Your wine must be directly poured into the bottles, but do remember to add sulfites as these are needed to stop fermentation and for preservation. The final step of the whole process is to seal the bottle with a suitable cork.