Thursday, October 1, 2009

Turning Grape Juice Into Wine

I'll outline the basic process for making wine in this post.

1. Pick bunches of grapes off the vine and rinse them off
2. Crush/De-stem the grapes. This is usually done at the same time with a machine. Back in the day, the stems would be manually removed, and then people would stomp on the grapes to crush them.
3. Press the crushed grapes to get the juice. Again, done mechanically, often with a bladder press.
4. Add Metabisulphites. This is an anti-bacterial agent that prevents runaway bacterial contamination. Supposedly even the Romans used this stuff, or something like it for the same purpose.
5. Filter the juice
6. Add sugar as needed so that the yeast will have enough food to make alcohol with. If its a good year, you won't have to add much, if any. Bad years you may need to add a bunch.
7. Test the amount of acid and adjust the acidity as needed. Again, if its a good year, you many not have to do much here.
8. Add yeast and do a primary fermentation
9. Siphon off the juice and continue secondary fermentation.
10. Add clarifying agents. This will bind with random stuff floating around and cause it to precipitate, leaving clear wine.
11. Add some more metabisulphite (it evaporates slowly) so that the wine will stay stable in bottles.
12. Cold stabilize (optional) the wine by putting it in a freezer at 25 degrees or so for a while. This will precipitate out some more stuff and supposedly cause the wine to become more stable.
13. Siphon it off into bottles and cork them.
14. Let it age in bottles for a couple months
15. Consume

Red wine is slightly different in that the primary fermentation is done on the skins. The juice from red grapes is actually white, and its the fermentation on the skins that turns it red. So for red wine, step 3 actually comes after step 8.

The place I bought the juice from already put the initial metabisulphites (step 4) in the juice, so I'm currently between items 4 and 5 with my Seyval juice.

No comments:

Post a Comment