| MAIN PAGE |
| The Wine Page |
| Ingredients |
| Wine Equipment |
Dan’s Cellar Notes September 2002
Some think the world’s people fall into clear-cut diametrically opposed “types.” You can be one type or another, but never both. There are “dog people,” and then there are “cat people;” “hotdogs-with-mustard people” and “hotdogs-with-ketchup people;” “wine people” and “beer people.” Beer people are down-to-earth, no-nonsense, folks who wear blue jeans or overalls and drive pickups. Wine people attend black tie affairs, have stock portfolios, and drive expensive SUVs right? This has never made any sense to me. I like cats and dogs; mustard and ketchup, I have both a pickup truck and a big SUV. Oh yeah, and I drink and I make both beer and wine. If you are a homebrewer who has thought about possibly dabbling in winemaking, this column is for you this month. This isn’t a “how-to” lesson, but, rather, a brief comparison of the process with homebrewing.
What does it take to make really good wine at home these days? If you have images in your head of stomping grapes in a huge wooden vat, or racks of large oak barrels in the barn out back…well your notions are a bit outdated. Home winemakers can buy grapes from local growers, or import them frozen or refrigerated from California, New York and even from France, but that’s not how most of us do it anymore. Instead, we buy a box from The Weekend Brewer, we take it home, add a few things and stir, and voila, it’s wine! Well, maybe it’s not quite that easy.
Today most make wine at home from kits. Homebrewers have a choice of approaches for making beer. We can use concentrated wort to which we just add water—perhaps with a short boil for sanitation. We can use dry and/or canned extract to which we add fresh hops and possible some specialty grains, or we can do a partial mash, augmenting our fermentables with extract. We can do a full grain mash, choosing a one-step infusion, a multi-step infusion, or, if we’re totally nuts, a double or triple decoction mash. There are similar gradations in approaches to winemaking. There are basic “four-week” kits based on grape juice concentrate, often with some sugar syrup added; and there are middle range “six-week” kits, which combine pure juice and concentrate. Premium kits contain more juice yet. One can also purchase boxes containing nothing but sterilized juice from select vineyards around the world. Or you can harvest, crush, macerate, press, ferment and age your own grapes.
If you read last month’s issue of Brew By You magazine, you probably saw a special section sponsored by the wine-kit industry. The point it made was that you, as a homebrewer, already have most of the equipment and skills you need to make good—even excellent—wine at home. There are differences, however, so lets look at some of those
__It’s easier to make sound wine than it is to make sound beer, especially if you follow kit instructions. If you start with a quality kit, use basic sanitation measures, and keep air off your wine, it is far less likely to become infected than is your beer. Why? Wine is typically around 12% alcohol rather than 4-5%. Wine is usually pretty acidic, and that tends to protect from some forms of infection and oxidation. Wine made according to the instructions that come with kits will be bottled in 4-6 weeks, or slightly more. Wine becomes more susceptible to spoilage the longer it remains in bulk storage (e.g., in a carboy), so early bottling and sound practice makes kit wine nearly foolproof. (I think it’s worth the risk to wait much longer before bottling, but that’ll be the subject of another column).
__Despite the fact that the manufacturers call their products “four-week” or “six-week” kits, don’t expect to be drinking your wine anywhere near that soon. Most white wine will need at least another 3-6 months of bottle aging, and reds will benefit greatly from 6 months to a year or more in the bottle. Winemaking requires more patience than beer brewing (unless you’re used to making barley wine or long-lagered doppelbock).
__There is no all-day mash-sparge-boil tedium with a wine kit. You can make up a wine in the time it takes to sanitize your fermenter, pour in the juice, add (filtered) water, sprinkle on some yeast, and pop on a bubbler. If you go with a reputable kit maker’s product, that will make good wine; however, most folks will want to check (and possibly adjust) the specific gravity and the total acidity of the “must,” which is what we call unfermented wine. “Total acidity” (also called “titratable acidity” or “TA”) is a new concept for most brewers, but it’s very important to winemakers. Ph is not so important when making wine, but TA is critical. To measure TA you will need a little wine test kit that you can buy from Weekend Brewer. It’s easy to use. Just make certain you don’t get any phenolphthalein solution from the testing kit into your wine. It’s a powerful cathartic and laxative! To increase the specific gravity (and potential alcohol) you simply add cane sugar. No additional extract or special sugars are required.
__You’ll need bottles, corks and a corker. Sure, you could put wine in a beer bottle and top it off with a crown cap, but how tacky! The bottles aren’t as expensive as they look, and a hand corker is very reasonable. Do spend the money for premium corks. Why go to the trouble and expense of making good wine only to have it ruined by leakage and oxidation due to a cheap cork? Crown caps and a beer-bottle capper work fine to cap off champagne bottles if you’re making sparkling wine, although wire-wrapped champagne corks, and their modern plastic counterparts, are more traditional.
__You’ll need storage space. While brewers may have one or two batches of beer in the ready-for-drinking stage, with some odd bottles squirreled away in the basement waiting for the next big homebrew contest, winemakers tend to have lots of wine in the aging process. Whether it’s in bottles, carboys, demijohns, barrels, or vats, you will eventually want to find ample space where the temperature is somewhat stable for storing wines.
Now, after a long, hot day in your pickemup truck drivin’ them doggies on the range, you can sit back on your front porch in your sweaty denim and leather britches, kick back with your feet on the rail and pop the top on a tall frosty….chardonnay!
Want to take a quick winemaking course? Call Bob and Jeanne at (804) 796-9760, or email them at wkendbr@weekendbrewer.com. They probably have one scheduled soon.