Home made wine kits

houseiseverything

Hello! Does anyone make their own wine from a kit, and if you do can you recommend a good one please? We made our own from grapes last year, and got 3 bottles! This year the grapes have withered on the vine..

Austin_Allegro

houseiseverything wrote: »

Hello! Does anyone make their own wine from a kit, and if you do can you recommend a good one please? We made our own from grapes last year, and got 3 bottles! This year the grapes have withered on the vine..

Winemaking kits aren't necessary to make home made wine. All you need to do is use grape juice or concentrate for 'proper' wine, or pretty much any fruit, veg or herb if you add sugar and nutrient. There's a big thread on it here somewhere...

Jenny_Wren_3

I love the black cherry kit from Wilkinsons for £8. It makes just over 5 bottles. They also make a lovely strawberry one, elder berry, elder flower and a few others.

gayleygoo

I make homemade wine for about 50p per bottle, from fruit juice and sugar. For one gallon (about 6 bottles), you need 2 cartons of juice, and 800g-1kg of sugar, plus 1/2 packet of wine yeast (or around 1tsp.)

White wine - 1 lt white grape juice and 1lt orange juice (or apple juice for a drier white wine)
Rose wine - 1 lt red grape juice and 1lt of any other juice - mixed berries, orange, cranberry, whatever.

Basically, any two cartons of juice, can be "from concentrate" if you like as these are usually cheapest. Experiment

Dissolve the sugar in 1 litre boiling water. Add fruit juices from the carton, to your sterilised fermenting vessel. Then add the sugar water. Cool to yeast pitching temp (about 20 degrees C) then add yeast. Add a mug of very strong black tea, made with two teabags (or use wine tannin if you have it). A tsp of glycerin will improve mouthfeel but isn't entirely necessary. Fermentation can be quite vigourous so you may want to wait a few days til it calms down before topping up to the neck of the FV with cooled, boiled water. Ferment out, rack, stabilise etc as you usually would for a wine.

You can also use fruit teabags to make lovely wines - Simmer 20 fruit teabags in 2 lts water for about half an hour. Add the sugar, 1 litre grape juice, wine tannin (or regular strong tea) and top up as usual to around a gallon. You can use 5l plastic water bottles as fermenters.

These wines taste good just a few weeks after bottling but do improve after a couple of months. Can be made in 5gallon buckets, just multiply the ingredients as necessary, 1 packet of wine yeast should suffice.

I go on an excellent UK homebrewing forum and they have tons of cheap homebrewing recipes on there :beer: