Category:Wine Making

Title

Wine Making (also, Winemaking)

Description

Home winemaking (the preferred spelling) is an enjoyable, educational and satisfying hobby. Winemaking recipes make the process easy and simple instructions ensure success. The basic steps are easy to learn and practice. Advanced principles and techniques are not difficult to master, but are not required to make good wine. There are many good websites that will walk one through the steps to making homemade wine. The Winemaking Home Page is one such site, designed for both the beginner and experienced winemaker. It strives to be the definitive resource for the amateur home winemaker.

The traditional base ingredient for wine is the grape because it naturally contains the correct mix of sugar, moisture, tannin, and nutrients required for fermentation and preservation, and it even carries its own yeast. Using a proven, cultured wine yeast greatly improves the product and reduces the risk of bacterial contamination. But grapes are not the only game in town. In truth, wine can be made from almost any edible, non-toxic plant if additional ingredients are supplied in the correct proportion. It may not be great wine, but it will be wine. Jack Keller, creator of The Winemaking Home Page, once made wine from sand burrs. It won three first place ribbons in various wine competitions.

A great variety of proven winemaking recipes exist, encompassing an equal variety of fruits, berries, flowers, vegetables, herbs, and even leaves. One should avoid backwoods recipes that involve some berries, sugar, water, a jug, and a balloon. They can be compared to baking bread in a fireplace -- one can do it, but there are much better and more controlled ways to bake bread today.

Good winemaking recipes will include a listing of the ingredients required and simple instructions. But before jumping in one needs to do a little homework. The Winemaking Home Page is organized to walk one through a simple learning process so that serious mistakes are avoided.

A section called The Basic Steps is where new or inexperienced winemakers should begin.

A Glossary of Winemaking Terms will help one understand the terminology that applies to making wine at home -- terms such as anaerobic fermentation, bung, fining, racking, and specific gravity.

And Getting Started will help one better understand how NOT to make wine, how to use the hundreds of recipes on this and other sites, how much wine the recipes make, and what one needs to get started.

To learn more, visit The Winemaking Home Page

Related Categories

Home Distilling Homebrewing Winemaking