It's muscadine time in
Louisiana and while I like muscadine jelly just fine. I
really like muscadine wine. So, I'll show you how to make this.
There are a lot of recipes online. You can look up
whatever you want in an old timey cookbook and all that
kind of stuff. They're all going to have the same basic
components- fruit, we're going to add water, sugar, and
a bit of yeast to kick things off and you can do this in just
a little five-gallon bucket. We've got about three gallons,
I want to go as high as four gallons in this five-gallon
bucket. Fill the rest with water and as I said, as much sugar as
you want and we can start the primary fermentation here in
this bucket. Generally speaking in wine making, oxygen is your
enemy. The more oxygen you get into that batch, the more likely
it'll spoil but you can start off in this bucket even though
it's not really airtight because early on, the yeast are
eating up those sugars so vigorously and spouting out CO2
that you count on the CO2 really filling this head space
and not letting oxygen back into the container. And now, we're going to move
inside to continue this wine making process. First step we
have to do is we have to gather all these grapes together. So, we
like doing our primary fermentation in these
five-gallon buckets. You can pick them up everywhere and
anyway, they hold quite a bit of grapes as you can see here.
You know, one little tip for everybody who's growing
muscadines at home. You don't have to harvest these things
all at one time. You can do what I did here and I harvested
about a gallon at a time. So, it was easy to grab some gallon
freezer bags and just harvest enough to fill up a bag, throw
it in my freezer and you know, in a couple weeks time, it was
very easy to get four, five gallons of muscadine grapes.
Another plus of freezing your grapes for later use is the
fact that the freezing itself, it will help you break open
more cells so we can release more of that juice contents
because you know, in the end, it's the juice that we're going
after to make that wine product. We're just about ready for our
primary fermentation. One more thing I want to mention right
now is pitching the yeast. You're going to add yeast to
this concoction of sugar, berries, and and water at some
point and you can use ordinary grocery store yeast if you want
or you can buy yeast from a wine store or an online shop
that's made specifically for wines. If you've got a more
sensitive palate than mine, you may taste the difference. So,
what I've done here and again, an optional step is you can
take a bit of sugar water and pitch some yeast into that
about 12 to 24 hours ahead of time. That way, when you pour
this mixture in your must, which is the the concoction we're
making here that's not wine yet, then the yeast already kind of
have a head start. Also, you want to store yeast in the
refrigerator but even if you're pitching it in dry take it out
and let it come to room temperature first so the yeast
are not quite as shocked by going from one temperature to
another. Similarly, if you're using frozen grapes make sure
and bring them to room temperature before you pitch
your yeast into the must. We're just about ready to mix
all our ingredients in and make our must to start our primary
fermentation. I like to use a mesh bag as a liner in this
five-gallon bucket or you can use a pillowcase if you don't
feel like buying one of these at the wine shop and either
way, they're washable and reusable. So, I'll put it in as
a liner. Of course, we're going to be putting grapes
etcetera into this bucket and then, when we start our
secondary fermentation in one to three weeks, it'll be a lot
easier to just pull this bag up and remove a lot of that material
and squeeze out as much juice as we can into the bag. Another
thing I'm going to add is yeast nutrient. This is another
optional but you can get this at wine supply shops and or
online. It's food grade urea, ammonium phosphate, and it
provides just a little bit of nutrients for the yeast to live
on for the next few months or so of fermentation that we've
got going on. Now, a lot of people ask about
sanitation in winemaking and there are necessary steps in
cleaning and sanitizing your equipment. This is not one of
them. You just have to bear in mind that these things have been
outside growing out in the wild for a long time and they're
bringing in a lot of wild yeast and other things to them.
There's no real reasonable way to sanitize them at this point.
So, keep things kind of clean but we're just counting on the
fact that the yeast are going to be so numerous
they'll out compete wild yeast or any bacteria that are on
these. We'll save the sanitation steps for when we're
going to bottling and racking the wine later. Alright, as I mentioned, the
yeast nutrients are optional but I've got about half a
bucket right now of muscadines in here. I think this is a good
time to go and add our yeast nutrients in there if you're
going to use that. And we're going to use a recipe with six
pounds of sugar all together. This is our primary first
fermentation. Only use about four pounds in this case or
about two thirds of your sugar. Save back about a third or
quarter for your secondary fermentation which is going to
happen in about another week or two. So, we're adding sugar, to
the muscadines. We're going to add water and that will become
our must which will add yeast to. You're going to let it sit
in this bucket for about a week or two. If you let it sit too
long, the fermentation will eventually settle down a bit
and you'll start getting oxygen back in the bucket which you
don't want. Oxygen, as I said, is our enemy in winemaking and
then, at some point, apparently, if you leave the
the must as they say on the skins on the actual fruit, the
seeds start to break down at some point and they've got some
bitter components you don't want in there. So, give it a
week, maybe as much as two weeks, to try to draw a lot of flavor
out of the muscadines and then you move on to your secondary
fermentation. So, basically we've got muscadines, sugar,
yeast nutrient. We're going to top this off with a little bit
of water and muscadines. Bring the sack in there. Put a lid on
it and we're good to go for the next couple of weeks.
