Homemade Wine Making

So I’ve always wanted to make my own wine. But I’ve never gotten around to it, mainly because I’ve been told that it is very expensive to buy the fruit – it can cost around $100. This quarter I am taking a wine class and one of the projects we could do was make our own wine, which sounded much better than writing a paper. I found that you can get juice right from the wineries, so I called up Mayers in Webster, NY and went up and got five gallons of Concord grape juice. I got two 3 gallon cardboy (glass jugs) and the other necessary tools and ingredients such as specialized yeast.

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I’m keeping a journal of it (let’s call it a log, sounds more manly) which can be found here at wine.eric-decker.com

The wine starts out in a bucket for a few days covered with a towel. There the yeast go crazy and use up a lot of the sugar, which is measured with a hydrometer and represented as specific gravity. Once a certain level is reached, the wine goes into one of the glass jugs and sits and ferments for a month or so. One of my wines is 100% concord grape, and the other is 2 parts concord, 1 part “cranberry juice” concentrate. They both had oak chips to flavor them during their primary fermentation, as well as sticks of cinnamon. They are both currently in their secondary fermentation state as of 1/14 and 1/20. When done, I should have about 30 750mL bottles of homemade wine. I hope it turns out good.

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