First Racking of Fruit Wine

August 4, 2013 by 3 Comments
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A wine aging in a secondary fermenter. (Photo courtesy Rich Weaver.)

My cherry berry wine has been in the primary fermenter for 11 days. It’s been 4 days since any significant activity was seen in the airlock and I think it’s time to rack it to secondary. Most country wines don’t benefit from spending much time on the lees — the winemaking term for the yeast sediment at the bottom of the fermenter. In beer, we’d call it trub.

The day I made the wine, I added 1 Campden tablet per gallon (3.8 L) to the must (the unfermented wine). This should have added 66 ppm sulfur dioxide (SO2) to the must, initially. When you add potassium metabisulfite (the active ingredient in Campden tablets), it releases some sulfur dioxide SO2 gas, the so-called free SO2. The rest of it remains dissolved, in one form or another, in the must. The percentage of the metabisulfite you add that ends up being released as free SO2 depends on the pH of the wine. The lower the pH, the less metabisulfite is needed to protect the wine. I didn’t take my initial must pH, so I don’t know what percentage of the 66 ppm SO2 existed as free SO2.

Sulfur dioxide at around my initial concentration serves two purposes — it kills microorganisms in the must (because wine musts are not boiled as beer worts are) and it protects the wine from oxidation. The next day, the level of SO2 is supposed to drop low enough that you can safely pitch your wine yeast. This must have happened because I added the yeast that next day and fermentation was in full swing within 24 hours. (I wasn’t watching it like a hawk, so I don’t know exactly when the airlock started gurgling.)

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Filed Under: Winemaking Techniques

Why Grapes?

July 11, 2013 by 9 Comments
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Most wine is made from grapes. If you are attempting to make wine from fruit other than grapes, it pays to understand why this is. (Photo from Wikipedia.)

You’ve probably noticed that most wine is made from grapes. If you go to the liquor store, you may be able to find a few wines made from other fruits (so-called country wines), but these are a small minority. The vast majority of wines are made from grapes. And not just any grapes —  most wines are made from grapes of the species Vitis vinifera.

With summer here and many fruit harvests to come, some homebrewers may be wondering if they can make homemade wine from the bounty of their local orchards or gardens. You can, but before trying to make wine from fruit, it pays to understand why most wine is made from grapes. In a nutshell, grapes contain the right balance of sugars, acids and tannins to make a fermented beverage that will keep and also taste good.

On their own, most other fruits do not. However, you can add sugar, acid or tannins to balance the juice from any fruit and ferment it into a delicious fruit wine. Over the summer, I’ll explain how to make fruit wine from a few of the more popular fruits. But first, let’s take a look at grapes and what makes them the fruit of choice for most winemakers.

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Filed Under: Winemaking Ingredients, Winemaking Techniques