Step by step

Probably one of the better step by step instructional articles I have found. Aside from the use of Campden, I figure this is definately worth a read.

Cheers,

Heinz


by Alison Crowe

Nothing feels as satisfying and authentic as making your first batch of wine from fresh grapes. And there's no better time to try it than in early autumn, when grapes all over the country are ripening in vineyards and backyard gardens.

There are many kinds of grapes to choose from, depending on where you live. Vitis vinifera is the classic choice for flavor, varietal character and historic authenticity. This famous European wine-grape family includes such renowned varieties as Chardonnay, Merlot, Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon. In the United States, to make a sweeping generalization, v. vinifera grapes thrive in California and the Pacific Northwest. They also grow well in microclimates scattered from New York to the Great Lakes, the Mid-Atlantic states and beyond.

Those who live in colder, wetter climates may not be able to find v. vinifera grapes grown locally. Don't be discouraged. Fine hybrids and Vitis labrusca grapes, which are less susceptible to cold and disease, may be growing near your home. Other options include ordering grapes through your favorite local winemaking shop or from a produce wholesaler.


Whatever kind of grapes you use, the general techniques, equipment and ingredients are the same. Here's an overview of some key steps along the way.

Basic Winemaking Equipment
Here's everything you need to make your first one-gallon batch of wine from fresh grapes. You should be able to find this equipment at any homebrewing or home winemaking supply shop.

- Large nylon straining bag
- Food-grade pail with lid (2 to 4 gallons)
- Cheesecloth
- Hydrometer
- Thermometer
- Acid titration kit
- Clear, flexible half-inch diameter plastic tubing
- Two one-gallon glass jugs
- Fermentation lock and bung
- Five 750-ml wine bottles
- Corks
- Hand corker

Inspecting the Fruit
Winemaking starts with inspecting the grapes. Make sure they are ripe by squishing up a good double handful, straining the juice and measuring the sugar level with a hydrometer, a handy device you can buy at a winemaking supply shop. The sugar density should be around 22° Brix - this equals 1.0982 specific gravity or 11 percent potential alcohol - and the fruit should taste sweet, ripe and slightly tart.

The grapes also must be clean, sound and relatively free of insects and other vineyard debris. Discard any grapes that look rotten or otherwise suspicious. Also, it's very important that all the stems are removed, since they will make your wine bitter.

Keeping it Clean

Winemaking demands a sanitary environment. Wash all of your equipment thoroughly with hot water, boiling what you can. It's also wise to arm yourself with a strong sulfite solution to rinse any equipment that comes in contact with your wine. To make it, add 3 tablespoons of sulfite powder (potassium metabisulfite) to a gallon of water and mix well.

Adjusting the Juice

Adjusting the juice or "must" of your wine is critical. Luckily, it's also easy. Acid content is measured with a simple titration kit; you can buy one at a supply shop. The ideal acid level is 6 to 7 grams per liter for dry reds and 6.5 to 7.5 grams per liter for dry whites.

Here's an example: If your must measures 5.5 grams per liter, then you need to add 1 gram per liter of tartaric acid to bring it up to 6.5 g/L. Since 0.2642 gallons equals 1 liter, 1 g/L is equivalent to adding 3.8 grams of tartaric acid to your one-gallon batch. Add this powder in one-eighth teaspoon intervals, checking acidity carefully after each addition, until the desired level is reached. You can buy tartaric acid at your supply shop.

You also need to monitor the sugar level with your hydrometer. The must should be about 22° Brix for both reds and whites. To bring the sugar concentration up, make a sugar syrup by dissolving one cup sugar into one-third cup of water. Bring it to a boil in a saucepan and immediately remove from heat. Cool before adding in small amounts, one tablespoon at a time, until the desired degrees Brix and specific gravity is reached. To lower the sugar level, simply dilute your must or juice with water.

The temperature of your must can also be adjusted to provide the perfect environment for yeast cells. Warming up the juice gently (don't cook or boil it!) is an easy way to bring it to pitching temperature without damaging the quality of the wine. Fermentation can sometimes reach into the 80° to 90° F range, though the 70° F range is standard for reds (whites often are fermented at cooler temperatures).



If your grapes have been refrigerated or are too cold, use this unorthodox but quick trick: Heat up a small portion of the juice in the microwave, mix it back into the fermentation pail and re-test the temperature. An electric blanket wrapped around the fermentation pail also works, but takes longer. For cooling, add a re-usable ice pack and stir for a few minutes. Pitch the yeast when the temperature reaches 70° to 75° F for reds and 55° to 65° for whites.

Racking the Wine

"Racking" means transferring the fermenting wine away from sediment. You insert a clear, half-inch diameter plastic hose into the fermenter and siphon the clear wine into another sanitized jug. Then top it off and fit it with a sanitized bung and fermentation lock. This can be a delicate operation and it's important to go slowly. You don't want to stir up the sediment, but you don't want to lose your siphon suction.



Bottling the Batch

Bottling may sound complicated, but it's really not. To bottle your wine, you simply siphon your finished product into the bottles (leaving about 2 inches of headspace below the rim), insert a cork into the hand corker, position the bottle under the corker and pull the lever. It's always wise to buy some extra corks and practice with an empty bottle before you do it for real.








Wine bottles can be purchased at home winemaking stores, or you can simply wash and recycle your own bottles. These supply stores also rent hand-corkers and sell corks. You should only buy corks that are tightly sealed in plastic bags because exposure to dust and microbes can spoil your wine. Corks can be sterilized just before bottling, with hot water and a teaspoon of sulfite crystals.

A one-gallon batch will yield about five standard-size (750 ml) bottles of wine. If the fifth bottle isn't quite full, then either drink that bottle or use smaller bottles to keep the wine. The key is to have full, sealed containers that are capable of aging.

Now you're ready to make your first batch of fresh-grape wine. Below you'll find step-by-step recipes for a dry red and a dry white table wine. The recipes have similar steps and techniques, with one important difference. Red wines always are fermented with the skins and pulp in the plastic pail; the solids are pressed after fermentation is complete. White wines are always pressed before fermentation, so only the grape juice winds up in the fermenting pail.





Dry Red Table Wine
Ingredients

18 lbs. ripe red grapes
1 campden tablet (or 0.33g of potassium metabisulfite powder)
Tartaric acid, if necessary
Table sugar, if necessary
1 packet wine yeast (like Prise de Mousse or Montrachet)
- Harvest grapes once they have reached 22 to 24 percent sugar (22° to 24° Brix).
- Sanitize all equipment. Place the grape clusters into the nylon straining bag and deposit the bag into the bottom of the food-grade pail. Using very clean hands or a sanitized tool like a potato masher, firmly crush the grapes inside the bag. Crush the campden tablet (or measure out 1 teaspoon of sulfite crystals) and sprinkle over the must in the nylon bag. Cover pail with cheesecloth and let sit for one hour.
- Measure the temperature of the must. It should be between 70° and 75° F. Take a sample of the juice in the pail and measure the acid with your titration kit. If it's not between 6 to 7 grams per liter then adjust with tartaric acid.
- Check the degrees Brix or specific gravity of the must. If it isn't around 22° Brix (1.0982 SG), add a little bit of sugar dissolved in water.
- Dissolve the yeast in 1 pint warm (80° to 90° F) water and let stand until bubbly (it should take no more than 10 minutes). When it's bubbling, pour yeast solution directly on must inside the nylon bag. Agitate bag up and down a few times to mix yeast. Cover pail with cheesecloth, set in a warm (65° to 75° F) area and check that fermentation has begun in at least 24 hours. Monitor fermentation progression and temperature regularly. Keep the skins under the juice at all times and mix twice daily.


- Once the must has reached "dryness" (at least 0.5° Brix or 0.998 SG), lift the nylon straining bag out of the pail and squeeze any remaining liquid into the pail.
- Cover the pail loosely and let the wine settle for 24 hours. Rack off the sediment into a sanitized one-gallon jug, topping up with a little boiled, cooled water to entirely fill the container. Fit with a sanitized bung and fermentation lock. Keep the container topped with grape juice or any dry red wine of a similar style. After 10 days, rack the wine into another sanitized one-gallon jug. Top up with dry red wine of a similar style.
- After six months, siphon the clarified, settled wine off the sediment and into clean, sanitized bottles. Cork with the hand-corker.
- Store bottles in cool, dark place and wait at least six months before drinking.


Red wine is fermented with the pulp and skins. This "cap" will rise to the top, so you need to "punch it down" frequently with a sanitized utensil.






Dry White Table Wine
Ingredients

18 lbs. ripe white grapes
1 campden tablet (or 0.33g of potassium metabisulfite powder)
Tartaric acid, if necessary
Table sugar, if necessary
1 packet wine yeast (like Champagne or Montrachet)

- Harvest grapes once they have reached 19 to 22 percent sugar (19° to 22° Brix). Pick over grapes, removing any moldy clusters, insects, leaves or stems.
- Place the grape clusters into the nylon straining bag and put into the bottom of the food-grade plastic pail. Using very clean hands or a sanitized tool like a potato masher, firmly crush up the grapes inside the nylon bag.
- Crush the campden tablet (or measure out one teaspoon of sulfite crystals) and sprinkle over the crushed fruit in the bag. Cover pail and bag with cheesecloth and let sit for one hour.
- Lift the nylon straining bag out of the pail. Wring the bag to extract as much juice as possible. You should have about one gallon of juice in the pail.
- Measure the temperature of the juice. It should be between 55° to 65° F. Adjust temperature as necessary. Take a sample of the juice in the pail and use your titration kit to measure the acid level. If it is not between 6.5 and 7.5 grams per liter, then adjust with tartaric acid as described above.
- Check the degrees Brix or specific gravity of the juice. If it isn't around 22° Brix (1.0982 SG) adjust accordingly.
- Dissolve the packet of yeast in 1 pint warm (80° to 90° F) water and let stand until bubbly (no more than 10 minutes). When it's bubbling, pour yeast solution directly into the juice. Cover pail with cheesecloth, set in a cool (55° to 65° F) area and check that fermentation has begun in at least 24 hours. Monitor fermentation progression and temperature at least once daily.
- Once the must has reached dryness (at least 0.5 degrees Brix or 0.998 SG), rack the wine off the sediment into a sanitized one-gallon jug, topping up with dry white wine of a similar style. Fit with a sanitized bung and fermentation lock. Keep the container topped with white wine. Be sure the fermentation lock always has sulfite solution in it. After 10 days, rack the wine into another sanitized one-gallon jug. Top up with wine again.
- After three months, siphon the clarified wine off the sediment and into clean, sanitized bottles and cork them.
- Store bottles in cool, dark place and wait at least three months before drinking.
Alison Crowe is an enologist at the Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, California and a graduate of the enology and viticulture department at University of California at Davis.

Does a plastic cork make for a lousy wine? - by Andrea Dickson

Here is a cute article on Cork vs Plastic. Good for a chuckle or two, I like this woman.

I remember the first time my mother opened a bottle of wine that featured a plastic cork. She gasped audibly; the family gathered in the kitchen, where we took turns poking at this odd, pliable plastic cylinder on the kitchen counter. We all knew, instinctively, that this was an INFERIOR bottle of wine, because it was corked with plastic and not... you know, cork. How unromantic! How untraditional! How... eh, pour me another glass, will you?

Since that fateful day, I've opened my fair share (OK, more than my fair share) of wine bottles that are corked with plastic. Or, more recently, with screw tops! Alright, I admit it - I've had wine from a box. The shame!

The truth is, despite the fact that I have a very strong sense of smell, I haven't noticed a difference between naturally and synthetically corked wine (there are some wine experts, or sommeliers, who claim that they can taste the difference between a wine that is sealed with a syntehtic cork and one sealed with a natural cork). My inability to differentiate might be because I'm sort of a lush, or maybe because there really ISN'T a big difference, performance-wise, between traditional corks and plastic ones. Or maybe it's because the synthetic corks are inert.

Why the switch to plastic corks/screwtops?

Nobody has a single, definite answer as to why certain wineries have moved away from natural corks - that is, corks made from the bark of the cork oak tree, which grows mostly in Portugal and Spain in lovely, arid forests. Some people have claimed that there is a shortage of cork available for wine production, as new wine regions are popping up all over the world (twenty years ago, if you had mentioned that you had a great Australian/South African/Peruvian red with dinner, you would have been involuntarily committed). Cork is also increasingly being used in other applications as well, such as flooring.

So, the demand for cork has increased. Even desirable wines are turning to "unnatural" corking methods. According to CorkFacts.com, there is enough cork growing in Portugal to last the wine-making world another 100 years. This fact is often quoted, probably in an attempt to sound reassuring, but to me, 100 years sounds like a very short amount of time.

The most oft-recited reason for switching to synthetic corkage is that natural cork allows roughly 10% of corked bottles to go bad (also known as "cork taint", or simply "corked"). A fungus that is found in cork bark may be the culprit for the loss of many hundreds of thousands of bottles annually. Synthetic corkage doesn't carry the same risk of fungal infection. Still undecided is if plastic corks allow for adequate aging of red wines.

So, plastic cork means it's a cheap wine, then?

Not necessarily. I've opened a few expensive bottles of wine that have featured plastic corks. When I started doing my cork research, I was hoping that synthetic corks were the key to finding the most frugal, sensible wine available. It turns out that you can't judge a wine by its corkage.

There are a plenty of people who likely feel that synthetic corks take the artistry out of wine-making, or that synthetic corks are indicative of a cheap, mass-produced wine, but as it turns out, you can't really tell which wines are going to feature synthetic corks until you actually open them.

My absolute favorite wine in the whole world uses natural cork. Hell, Charles Shaw uses natural cork. So, there's a mental barrier for me to jump over when I open a bottle of wine with a synthetic cork. The difference is likely purely mental. As Treehugger points out:

"Natural corks have proven themselves over the years but it’s the cultural resonance that extends even to the novice drinkers. This is something that the traditional cork industry has capitalized on and has taken huge strides to fight back. U.S. cork importers have created a rigorous testing system to weed out tainted cork while the Portuguese cork industry has launched an extensive $8 million campaign to commend the natural cork."

Besides, you can't tell what kind of cork is in the bottle when you buy it, since the cork is usually covered by foil or wax. And anyway, I tend to buy bottles based on the label design. Don't laugh - you do it, too.

I'm curious as to how Wise Bread readers feel about this: we're a frugal group, to be sure, but I get the idea that many of our readers value quality and craftsmanship over pure, industrial reliability.

Environmentally, what's the deal?

There are environmentalists who argue that allowing screwtop and synthetic corks to take over the world of wine-making will be detrimental to the cork forests in Portugal, which are home to may rare animals. It's odd to think of cork forests, which are more like orchards than forests, as wild habitats, but in truth, they're probably a combination of the two: a place for wild animals and a working forest. Some activitst posit that the loss of the natural cork industry would mean the loss of many thousands of European jobs, as well.

Besides being decidedly unsexy, plastic corks are... well, they're plastic. Plastic is so great in so many ways, and so terrible in many other ways. Tree Hugger and Wise Geek both proffer that one can recycle plastic corks, although I've never seen any evidence of this in my area. Natural cork is easily composted (or saved for the sake of memory), but plastic corks... I can't figure out what to do with them.

I'm prone to advocating for the natural cork approach, even though the thought of wasted wine due to fungus makes me die a little inside. Cork trees do grow in Portugal and Spain, which are dry Mediterranean climates. Who's to say we can't expand cork production to other ares of the world with similar climates? Parts of the east San Francisco Bay Area and North Africa come to mind almost immediately.

How do readers feel about this issue, if you've given it any thought? Do you care, one way or another, about how your wine is corked? Are you a cork snob? A two-buck-chuck swiller? A boxed-wine kind of wino? Do you feel strongly enough about the issue to boycott a wine based on its corkage. or is it a null issue for you?

Interesting cork facts:




- Corks are made from bark that has been stripped from the tree trunk. The tree is not damaged, and can regrow all of its bark every 9 years or so. However, the average cork tree only lives 150 years.
- Wine was originally made in casks that were "sealed" with a layer of olive oil to keep the wine from coming into contact with the air.
- Natural cork recycling is common in Australia and Europe.
- Wine corks are coated with a thin layer of resin or wax to prevent rotting while a wine ages.
- Many European beer bottles are sealed with cork. So are some home-brewed soft drinks.
- You can buy cork from India, apparently.
- Natural cork has a Poisson's ratio of nearly zero. And yes, I knew what Poisson's ratio was before I wrote this. Also, I like Firefly. Why yes, I am single. Why?


Source: http://www.wisebread.com

Put a cork in it

Here is another mooched article on the different types of corks








Wine Corks are made from cork material from the cork oat tree. Corks elasticity makes it suitable for bottle stoppers on wine bottles, which represent about sixty percent of all cork products.

There are several different types of wine corks.

Synthetic Wine Corks

Many cheaper bottles of wine are now stopped with synthetic corks, however although they are becoming popular, they tend to destroy expensive corkscrews, and a main concern is their ability to be able to preserve a bottle of wine if left un opened for a long time period; it has been claimed that synthetic corks can lose their elasticity and this oxygen can get into the bottle. They do not dry out or rot, however.


Plastic Champagne Wine Corks These corks are designed to be used with champagne bottles. The cork along with the champagne bottle is designed to make a very strong seal to withhold the pressures produced by champagne.
What Size Cork to use
The standard wine bottle has an opening of 18.5 mm and the standard cork has been designed to fit the standard wine bottle. Cork sizes are designated by a number and length and the number corresponds to the diameter of the cork. The #9 cork, is the standard diameter cork for wine bottles with a typical lengths of 1.5 inches, and 1.75 inches. Shorter corks of 1.5 inches are recommended for less than one year old and longer corks of 1.75 inches are recommended for wines that are older than one year. The #8 cork is the standard size cork for champagne bottles and the #7 cork is the standard size cork for beer bottles.
Clearly there are several different types of wine cork available, as well as varying sizes and all of these should be taken into account when choosing how to stop a bottle when preserving a bottle of wine.