Home-made wine recipes?

[User482]

Many years ago @rvw made some excellent mead and I made some mediocre beer from a kit. Either were by far the cheapest way to get sloshed for a pair of impecunious 20-somethings. More recently we've made some rather agricultural cider from the apples in the garden. I think @User482 has it right:



My parents tried (also because of cost) but shared my slightly slap-dash attitude to sterilisation. My grandfather drank a pint of his home-made beer every lunchtime and another pint every evening. He was a stickler for cleanliness. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

There's a classic and very detailed book that my parents had on their shelves, and I found a second-hand copy of a while ago:
View attachment 373896

I inherited this from my grandfather:

It recommends filtering wine through asbestos...

 

[tyred]

Bottling is the best part...

 

[lazybloke]

I inherited this from my grandfather:
View attachment 373904

It recommends filtering wine through asbestos...

OMG, pretty sure that's the book my dad had (I think I left it at at ex's flat, along with some original Beatles vinyl. Sob).
Does it have the blackberry ginger wine recipe? And a page towards the end about Mead & Metheglin?

Definitely keen to have another go.
The variety of yeasts available on the web now... amazing. I'll never miss the Boots homebrew shelf again.

 

[Tin Pot]

I made a drinkable white wine from my garden grapes - so a few pointers:

1. You'll need about 20lbs of grapes to make one demijohn of wine. If you have less, you could use it to blend into an apple wine.
2. The grapes must be pressed - if you blend them the seeds and skins will impart unpleasant flavours and excess tannin.
3. You could tread the grapes to press them, but I got by with pressing them by hand through muslin-lined colander, with the aid of a potato masher. It does take a while, and don't forget to boil the muslin as it's a bacteria trap.
4. The must will almost certainly need to be chaptalized (have sugar added) as outdoor grown grapes in this country don't develop enough of their own. You're looking for a gravity of 1080-1095. Mine was about 1060 so I added heavy sugar syrup to bring it up. There are online calculators so you can work out how much to add. So a hydrometer and trial jar is essential.
5. Leave the must and sugar, a crushed campden tablet and some yeast nutrient to stand for 24 hours in a covered sanitised bucket, then aerate well with a sanitised whisk, and pitch the wine yeast. After a few days you can rack it into a demijohn and leave to ferment out. Try to keep fermentation at a steady temperature of around 20 degrees. The banana flavour you mentioned can occur if you've fermented at too high a temperature.
6. Once all fermentation has ceased rack it again to get the wine off the dead yeast. You can measure the gravity at this point to calculate the alcohol content. I then left it in a demijohn for a few months before bottling.If you have an air gap due to the racking, top up with some white wine (preferably) or boiled cooled water
7. The wine I made was minging at first, but became quite pleasant after six months, and better still after a year.
8. A general tip: beer and wine making is mostly about cleaning and sanitising.

20lbs of grapes...how much grapevine do you need to produce that much fruit?

 

[Tin Pot]

Chef - No banana wine for table 6

I really want banana flavoured wine now. Banana beer was false advertising.

 

[User482]

OMG, pretty sure that's the book my dad had (I think I left it at at ex's flat, along with some original Beatles vinyl. Sob).
Does it have the blackberry ginger wine recipe? And a page towards the end about Mead & Metheglin?

Definitely keen to have another go.
The variety of yeasts available on the web now... amazing. I'll never miss the Boots homebrew shelf again.

That's the one. Though we shall draw a discreet veil over the beer recipes.

 

[User482]

20lbs of grapes...how much grapevine do you need to produce that much fruit?

Mine's about eight years old, trained over a pergola. I get that much in a very good summer. Much less this year: we had a cold snap in the spring which damaged the flowers, and a wet August just when we needed some heat to ripen the fruit. I'll be pressing the grapes for juice and add them to apple wine. I opened a bottle of last year's this evening, and it's rather good.

 

[Tin Pot]

I've got about four panels like this, SW facing as you can tell from the growth. I was thinking of using for grape once I've cleared it up:

View attachment 371487

I don't think I can stretch my neighbours vine from the other side all the way around, and the rhs says plant from October onwards.

Not sure how well that side drains but iirc we get a lot of ant hills - a bad thing, right?

 

[twentysix by twentyfive]

I really want banana flavoured wine now. Banana beer was false advertising.

http://www.wine-making-guides.com/banana_wine.html