Making Wine the Easy Way

This is another great instructional from my online buddy, Bob. His first how-to appearing on JustLive was Making Cheese the Easy Way.

Bob is a genuinely self-sufficient soul, living off the grid somewhere on the North American continent. His insight and experience in all things DIY is admirable. On that note, here’s his recipe for homemade blackberry wine…

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Since I shared my simple cheese making methods with y’all, I thought I show ya the simple way I make wine as well.

As with cheese, making wine can be as simple a process or as complicated as you wish to make it.

I never use grapes. I don’t have any. I have used quite a wide variety of fruit, everything from Service berries to pineapple. This time I’m using blackberries, which always makes a very good wine.

The basic recipe is:

• One gallon clean water. I get my water from a spring so it has no chlorine in it
• One gallon fresh picked Blackberries
• Eight cups sugar
• One package ordinary bread yeast. (2 1/4 teaspoons full)

The equipment needed is quite simple and basic. You’ll need a large stainless or enamel pot or two with close fitting lids, a length of plastic tube to siphon your wine from one container to the other, and a colander or strainer.

It’s nice to have a corking tool and a fancy wine siphoning tool with a push-valve in one end, and a cap on the other end so it doesn’t suck sediment directly off of the bottom of a container.

I got started without these extra tools, and decided to get them after I had made a batch and learned how fun wine making was. The siphoning tool in particular is inexpensive, and makes siphoning the wine back and forth a much cleaner operation!

I start by cleaning a big stainless steel pot out, and boiling a small quantity of water in it with the lid on to sterilize it.

Put the water and berries into the pot, and start to heat it.

Add the sugar, bring it to a boil, and gently simmer the mix for ten minutes.

Now remove from heat, cover and let sit for 24 hours.

This batch was started on August 8th.

After 24 hours, strain the mix through a coarse colander into another boil-sterilized pot.

Don’t worry about any little chunks of berries that get through the strainer because the yeast actually needs this additional nutrients.

Next, sprinkle the yeast gently on top of the liquid so it floats on top. Now cover the pot, and put it in the back of your kitchen counter so it’s out of the way and will not get bumped, and let it ferment.

Straining the berries.

Adding the yeast.

Now let it ferment.

Wait! no airlock you cry? The lid of the pot is the airlock. As gas pressure builds up inside the pot, the lid is gently raised and the gas “burps” out. Then the lid falls back into place sealing the pot and preventing to much air from getting in.

In the old days, it was traditional to make wine like this in a big crock covered with a plate. A hand full of dried beans was the traditional weight to put on top of the plate. As you can see, I tend to use a pile of half dollars on top of the lid.

The next step is to “Rack” the wine from time to time. “Racking wine ” is one of those fancy wine making terms that means simply pour or siphon the wine from one container to the other.

The idea is to leave the sediment behind in the bottom of the container, and move just the wine. A siphon works best for this, but in the past I have simply poured the wine carefully from one container into the next.

Always to be sure and boil-sterilize the new container first, and remember it needs to be covered with a well fitting lid or plate.

I generally rack the wine about a week after adding yeast, and at least once more maybe a week after that.

If the wine is particularly cloudy, I’ll rack it more often. I don’t mind a little sediment in the bottle, and every time you rack the wine you leave a little liquid left behind in the old container, so the more you rack the less wine you wind up with. Just rack the wine as needed to clear the color up.

Sediment left after racking the wine.

Some fruit contains so much pectin that the wine can be quite hard to clear. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t affect the taste of the wine anyway. I find strawberry wine is quite difficult to clear completely, yet we always make a batch every year because it is my wife’s favorite.

The fermentation continues until the rising alcohol content kills the yeast. I generally bottle the wine after five or six weeks.

Now it’s time to bottle the wine. Again, the siphoning tool helps a great deal here. Make sure the bottles are squeaky clean. A boiling water bath in a big pot works well.

You really probably should use brand new cork every time. I have re-used old corks and didn’t have any trouble, but they are cheap enough when purchased by the hundred.

Bottling the wine on October 8th.

To cork the bottle, start the cork in by hand. Place the bottle upright on a firm surface, put a piece of wood over the cork and hit the wood with a mallet to drive the cork in.

Or simply start the cork by hand and grab up that bottle in both hands, put the cork against the wall, and lean into it!

If you wind up doing this a lot, a corking tool is really nice. They are a bit expensive for a tool so seldom used though, so whether or not you wind up getting one will likely depend on how good you turn out to be stuffing corks in by shoving bottles against the wall.

Corking the wine.

After you have bottled the wine, leave it upright in an out of the way and easy to clean area for a day or two! It takes a bit of experience to learn when it’s time to bottle the stuff.

If it is bottled to early it can generate enough pressure to pop the corks, which really makes a mess if the wine is already stored on it’s side!

Eventually, when your sure you don’t have a grenade on your hands, the wine should be stored on it’s side so the corks stay wet, preferably someplace dark and reasonably cool.

The finished product.

This wine is best when left to age a year or so, but don’t let it sit for to many years because it may go bad and turn into vinegar. I tend to drink it all up in the year after I made it.

It is essential to keep a journal, and record the details of each batch you make. In time, you will learn how to tailor the process to produce wine that is just the way you like it.

According to my journal, this is the eighteenth batch of wine I’ve made.

A word about sulfates -

You may have notice that I don’t use any sulfate compounds when making wine. Most folk add “Campden” tablets to wine, which is potassium metanbisulphite.

My main objection is that this stuff is literally poison! It is designed and intended to kill bacteria, and will certainly help kill the beneficial bacteria that lives in your gut. Why the heck would you add poison to something made specifically intended to drink, something you may share with family and friends?

My next objection is that it simply isn’t needed. It’s just one more thing “that you gotta have to make wine” Well, it just ain’t so.

Gently boiling the water and berries first seems to work just fine, and boil-sterilizing the pots and bottles is cheap, self-sufficient and very effective.

Sulfates can be used to stop fermentation when the wine is at a certain specific gravity, but why bother? The alcohol will do this all by itself with no help from you at all.

Lastly, I swear I can taste the sulfates in store bought wine, and I sure as heck don’t like it. maybe it’s all in my mind, but there you have it.