Winemaking 101 -Updated

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Wine recipes are here at Home Fermenter Center

 Most of these recipes call fir 20+ pounds of fruit. I had about 30 lbs of plums here.

Before you start sanitize everything that might touch your wine. You can use an iodine sanitizer or boiling hot water. Be careful about soap residue, and never use bleach.

I washed the plums under running warm water and then cut them into small chunks while taking the pits out.

Chunks in the bucket

While I was cutting the plums I was boiling water in both my pots. In the big one (which is really a canner but I use it for wine/beer) I had boiled about 3 gallons to which I later added 13 lbs of sugar. 

Still cutting plums. It took about two hours. 

I used a potato masher to get them as small as I could. The plums were pretty firm so the pieces were a little bigger than I wanted them to be. 

Plum carnage. No I wasn't using windex in the winemaking. 

So after I had the fruit in the bucket, I crushed and added campden tablets (sulfite to keep it from spoiling and turning brown) then I added the boiling hot sugar water, topped up with boiling water till my bucket was about 7 gallons full. I covered it with a towel and let it sit all night long. It needed to cool. 

When I got home for lunch today I rehydrated my yeast by mixing it in with warm water in a small cup. I added a few tbsp of sugar and 1/2 cup of my wine and let it start bubbling. While that came to life I took a measurement of the wine with the hydrometer and it came out to 11% potential alcohol. That's fine for me. 

When the yeast mixture was working really good (it smelled yeasty and was bubbling) I put it in the bucket. I didn't mix it around, Yeast like living in colonies, I'll mix it tonight when I put in the rest of the ingredients. 

I'm headed out to run some errands, I'll add the rest of the ingredients when I get home. It still needs acid blend, pectic enzyme, and yeast nutrient. 

A few hours after pitching the yeast. Its already starting to form a cap, but its not really not bubbly yet, and smells more like bread yeast than wine. 

The additives

I just covered it with a thick towel, enough to keep flies out, but still the gasses can escape. 

The morning after pitching the yeast the wine was bubbly and smelled like... wine! I pushed the cap back into the wine, but I was careful not to stir it up too much. 

5 days pass (during which I worked my butt off at school)

It was time to rack the wine when the cap was turning brown and it wasn't bubbling so aggressively. Its good to get oxygen to the yeast at the beginning of fermentation, but if you leave it out in the open air too long you get oxidization and possibly bad bacteria or foreign yeasts that can ruin your wine.

You can see the wine under the cap of plums. I try to keep the siphon hose halfway between the cap and sediment.

carefully holding the sipon hose so that it doesn't drop down into the sediment.  I have fruit flies so I had to keep the towel over the primary fermenter until I was finished 

Halfway done, I always siphon slowly to keep as little air from the wine as possible. 

Ru quick come take a picture of me racking the wine!

All done, with the fermentation lock on. It keeps all the air out while letting the carbon dioxide escape.

This was a little extra wine that I'll store in the back of the fridge for when I rack the wine in a few weeks. I might need it to top off the wine after I get the sediment out. 

The plums and sediment. It kind of stuck together in a lump

I'll rack it in three weeks to get it off the sediment and top it off with the wine I put in jars in the fridge. 

Here is a video of the bubbles. Its mesmerizing.

After three weeks its starting to clear, I have sediment built up in the bottom, and its bubbling less frequently.  I'm going to rack it tomorrow or early in the week. 

The color is beautiful.  

On Monday July 18 Freddie and I bottled the wine. It was DELICIOUS. We bottled this plum, and also 5 gallons of mixed Blackberry and Blueberry wine. We got pretty... happy bottling it. 

First we made some of it into Sangria and poured ourselves a drink. Then we soaked our bottles in a light bleach solution before we used the bottle washer with HOT water to clean and sanitize them. Freddie filled and I capped.