How to Ruin Your Homemade Wine

today on the home wine making Channel I'm going to talk about some home wine making disasters these are the kinds of things that cost you a lot of money many of them have happened to me or they've happened to some of my close friends so stay tuned if you need to see more home winemaking Channel videos you might find them on my patreon page patreon.com makewine sometimes it just makes more sense to post over there as a small YouTube Creator it doesn't make hardly any Financial sense anymore to make videos on YouTube so for a couple dollars you can watch a few things there might even save you some money by saving a a big mistake I've also got a handful of my stainless steel mixer degassers that not enough to really sell on my website but I'll give them away on my patreon page in the coming months so stay tuned for that now let's talk about some big time disasters that have happened to me and I'd love to hear about yours because there's probably a lot that hasn't happened to me but I don't want it to happen in the future one thing that happens to a lot of people is you get these big beautiful six gallon glass car boys and for the most part they're pretty durable but they're not indestructible one time I set up one of my carboys to dry this is a long time ago before I had my Carboy dryers where it's kind of a intentionally made to prop them up well I kind of propped it up on a wooden crate thinking that would be good and for the most part it was until about two in the morning when I'm sound asleep and I just hear glass shattering everywhere and you wake up to glass shatter and you're thinking somebody's in my house so I'm walking around my house like ready to go here when it turned out I shattered a Carboy and man was I frustrated because I had already been about one Carboy short well now I was two car boys short so if you're going to set your car boys up to dry make a little wooden prop kind of thing that's much better I've got one if you go way back in my videos I've got some little homemade winemaking equipment videos you'll find some pretty pretty sturdy Carboy props another way people break carboise is they get those clamp on handles so you pick up this is even worse by the way because now you're breaking a Carboy full of wine so you pick it up and You Yank the top off and shatter your car boy to be honest I've never had this happen some people swear that it can happen but just be careful when you're using those kind of lifter handles make sure you support it well I like to use a milk crate to pick up a full Carboy seems to be a little bit safer it's got that plastic bottom so you're not banging it on things like a concrete floor which brings me to my third way that I've actually seen this a lot lately not personally but I've seen a lot of people having this happen where some of these new carboys it's almost like they're not heat treated or tempered quite right so there's a lot of internal stresses in the glass and people will set their Carboy on a hard floor even sometimes a wood floor and it'll blow the bottom out of their Carboy and just make a massive massive mess and it's I mean even worse as you're losing all this wine you could have aged it for two years and finally boom all your all your hard work and patience is gone so I like to use little um pieces of like that luxury vinyl flooring if I'm on concrete I'll put a couple squares of that down set carboys on that and I've never had that problem and just by quality glass it's not really worth saving a few bucks to buy you know the the cheapest Carboy that there is the next thing that can happen and this I would bet if you've been making wine for more than about five years this has happened to you and that is the notorious wine volcano so when Wine's fermenting a lot of times I'll ferment a white wine in a Carboy a lot of people ferment things like kits in carboys well it's pretty similar to like a carbonated soda and if you do something to agitate it it could literally volcano like you've seen when people put like a Mentos in in like a a Coke or Pepsi literally will do that and what seems to be happening is if you add like a powdered additive maybe it's tannin maybe it's a you know tartaric acid or potassium bicarbonate it really creates like a nucleating site for the all these little Bubbles and they just go Bonkers and boom um so I always like to mix my additives in either a little bit of wine or a little bit of water and really really like make sure there's no dry powder and I'm always going to add really slow and if I'm going to mix it up I'm also going to mix it up slow because use maybe my Punch or my little mixing tool with a drill and you get a little crazy sure enough boom volcano I've probably had this happen to me more times than I should have because you just get a little careless and it it can still happen so watch out for that and on the the topic of making a massive mess once you first start making wine from grapes like real whole grapes which I recommend for anybody that wants to make high quality red wine what happens is maybe you're fermenting in a bucket maybe you're fermenting in a barrel usually some sort of open top container and you might have a little bit of room on top of the line you think you're pretty good once that wine starts fermenting all those skins will fill up with um CO2 and just expand and you come down the next morning and you've just got a massive massive mess this can happen with fresh fruits too so if you're working with like blueberries strawberries blackberries anything where you kind of break them up to get the fermentation started and then you you get it going it can just swell up you really want to be a little bit generous on how much air space you're leaving during fermentation and during fermentation air is usually a good thing so you're not really worried about oxidation the yeast is very air hungry you actually have a lot more problems when you air starve a fermentation than when you you know give too much fermentation or too much air to a fermentation and now back to things that could happen when you first start making wine with grapes when you go to press what you'll do is you'll scoop this fermented wine out of whatever your fermenter is pour it into your press which is often a basket press it's got the wood slats and you can get you know pretty uh pretty boisterous when you're pouring that in sometimes you're drinking a little bit of wine and what happens once in a while is you pour a little too much in it starts kind of shooting out of the spout and overshoots your you know your bucket or your funnel or whatever you're pressing into and you could lose a couple bottles of wine like that and it's always such a shame especially when you're working with really you know expensive grapes so just pour into that press kind of careful even once you start cranking the Press take it easy especially once you've you know are just getting it started is when it can really flow like crazy and also make sure you always have a second container ready to go to swap out because you can fill that bucket or fill that Carboy and and then you're you're kind of scrambling now this is a disaster I've heard way too many times and it has to do with adding things like sulfite or tartaric acid or potassium bicarbonate and one of a couple things can happen you can grab the wrong powder all these things kind of look pretty similar so maybe you're thinking I need to add 10 grams of um tartaric acid to adjust my acid and you accidentally add 10 grams of potassium metabisulfite and you have bleached the wine you've made it this sterile unfermentable just you know smells like burnt matches kind of environment which is you really can't come back from it you might be able to you know add something that will counteract the sulfite like hydrogen peroxide but you've really damaged the chemical structure of that wine so you've really you know caused a lot of harm I see this with a lot of people that make wine kits too where it says you know add this before the fermentation add this after the fermentation well sometimes they add that little packet of potassium sorbate accidentally before fermentation and what potassium sorbate does is it basically prevents yeast from replicating or from budding and making more yeast cells so you really can't establish a colony of yeast to ferment and all you have is this stinky off-smelling struggling fermentation so be very very careful when you're adding this stuff make sure you don't mix up milligrams with grams you don't want to accidentally add like a hundred times more or add the absolute wrong thing like Adam bicarbonate when you're trying to add tartaric acid and completely move the wine in the opposite direction again a pretty easy mistake to make because you just got so much going on and you start to get confident and then you get complacent and that kind of stuff can happen this can happen to um a lot of people will say when you're aging wine to use a solid stopper or a solid bung instead of an airlock and that seems to be the talk of a lot of these you know wine communities and there is actually truth to that because when you have an airlock especially a plastic airlock air can dissolve in the water which works its way to the line if the wine expands and contracts a bubble can go backwards send some air into the wine and the plastic is actually not completely impermeable to air so you are letting some oxygen into the wine but if you're sulfide and if you've got a wine like a red wine with a lot of tannin it can handle a little bit of air consider it basically micro oxidation which can help that align age but you just kind of gonna stay on top of it but what can happen when you're you try to do the right thing and you put a solid bun in with no hole whether it's cork or it's rubber is and I've seen this I've done this and it's actually steered me away from solid bongs is even just a little bit of expansion and contraction from the temperature changing will fire that bung off off the ceiling it'll be you won't even be able to find it it could be like all the way across the room and it might not happen right away it might happen a week after you put it on when you're just not really even checking on things and now this wine that you're trying not to oxidize has totally oxidized so to be safe I generally just do air locks you can use glass airlocks which are much you know more air impermeable and also the um like the the rubber stoppers that actually kind of smell like vulcanized rubber that smell is not going to get into your wine those are much more air tight than like a silicone stopper which is going to be air pretty pretty air permeable actually this is another thing I've seen in the comments section where people are like oh awesome I found some grapes let's go make some wine so they see grapes they pick grapes they go to make wine well maybe they pick those grapes in like July and those grapes are they're not even really starting to ripen yet let alone being optimally ripe an optimal ripeness is really what makes good wine you really need that optimal ripeness and they're like well how can I make wine from these well you really you really can't like you can add a bunch of sugar to it you can add a bunch of um potassium bicarbonate to try to take the edge off this acid but you you will you don't want to just go pick a fruit because you see a fruit you want to wait and let that fruit ripen that's when it's going to build the flavors that you want so it's going to get rid of some of the flavors that you don't want it's going to build the sugars the acid acids it's gonna really be not really right to be making wine from wildly under ripe fruit no matter what fruit it is this happened to me um I don't I won't say this is common but I was making wine with a friend we were cranking the the crusher destemer one of us would be taking the bin out to dump it in our big fermenter put it back in pour some grapes in crank some more well um get to talking and I I hear I'm down there pouring the the grapes and the fermenter and I hear that crusherdy steamer cranking and I'm thinking what like I have the bin what's that cranking and I come up and she's just cranking the crushery stemmer and all these grapes and and juice is just falling onto the ground and you know these grapes can be easily you can spend three dollars a pound on premium grapes so a couple minutes of cranking you could blow through fifty dollars like nothing so just um maybe pay attention to what you're doing if you're having some wine while you're doing your wine making maybe pay attention even a little bit more now a lot of people get into wine making and they want to jump to a barrel like a 30 gallon barrel a 10 gallon barrel or the ultimate like a 66 gallon full-size Barrel but a word of caution when scaling up to a wine barrel especially if you're coming from things like car boys is they are pretty um air permeable and at the bigger sizes it becomes less of a problem but at the small sizes like a 10 gallon barrel you really got to be careful because that wine will oxidize pretty easily you need things are going to help you not oxidize are going to be good good acid so relatively low PH great tannin um and you really got to keep your eye on the the free sulfur dioxide so the sulfite because it'll just um react with that oxygen it'll completely go away and to be honest if you have a wine with like a a pH of like 3.7 or higher and it's not just insanely high in tannin it's gonna be dangerous to um to age that in a barrel unless you're pretty pretty experienced so be careful when scaling up to a barrel because you could have a wine that basically smells like nail polish remover or vinegar which are the couple of the big big ways a wine can oxidize and kind of unoppy something you want you know 150 or 300 bottles of this isn't maybe a huge disaster but a lot of people will cork their wines and just put it right on the Shelf but what I like to do when I cork my wines I like to leave them sit upright for about a week because sometimes you squeeze that cork and it doesn't really swell back out and create a nice perfect seal and if you put it right on the shelf right away the line will kind of work its way up the Cork and it can even kind of weep out of the end so just a word of advice usually cork it leave the corks leave the bottles upright and shouldn't really have that problem this is maybe my last disaster that comes to mind um as you scale up as a wine maker you get in maybe you start with one gallon you get to six gallons and then maybe at some point you're making 30 or 50 gallons of wine with some buddies you need to keep in mind that yeast will create a lot of heat actually and the bigger the volume the more this heat can start to kind of build up and run away on you it's not uncommon to start a red wine fermentation and put some heaters on it whether it's space heaters or seed heaters even a heated blanket just a warm the temperature up to get into that kind of 80 85 degrees Fahrenheit that can really help extract nicely but you know once that fermentation takes off maybe you go to bed you come check on it in the next morning that fermentation can start roaring on you and it would not be uncommon to see it take it all the way to 100 degrees Fahrenheit where you're starting to kind of cook the wine and you're also starting to create a hostile environment for the yeast so then you'll see things like hydrogen sulfide the rotten egg smell other things you just don't want to have in your wine so kind of ease up on the temperature and don't like leave the wine for 12 hours without watching it while having something like a seed heater on it and have things ready to go like you could put a frozen milk jugs and things to to cool it down if things kind of kind of do run away on you good luck in your wines this year I hope you don't have any disasters like this but if you do I'd love to hear about them thanks for watching

Channel: The Home Winemaking Channel

Views: 7,556

Keywords: Wine, winemaking, home winemaking, winery

Id: EnsevFH1OZk

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2023