Making Winery Quality White Wine From Juice... At Home!

today on the home wine making channel we're going to make a white wine from juice if you like wine making videos like this make sure to subscribe below and if you want even more content and want to help support the home wine making channel swing by my patreon site patreon.com make wine now if you don't have access to fresh grapes you're actually going to generally want to make a white wine from juice if you had your own vineyard what you would do is you'd pick those grapes you'd crush them and press them as virtually as fast as you can and turn them into juice so ideally you kind of want the vineyard to handle all that and send you the juice so that you're not shipping these grapes with all this air contact it's just not as ideal now not all juices are created equal the juice that we have here is straight off the vineyard crushed pressed cold settled unpasteurized it is sulfited if it wasn't sulfited it would be brown dark brown like apple cider which you might have seen in my last video about hyper oxidation which is a technique in white wine making because it is unpasteurized juice you really i could say it makes things a little bit trickier but it also has the potential to make a much better wine than a wine that has been pasteurized and can kind of get sometimes these cooked type off aromas and flavors you'll often see this in a wine kit call it a kit taste or kit smell it's usually this byproduct called isoamyl acetate which can kind of have a banana runt smell going on whether you're making white wine from this kind of juice pasteurized juice kit juice for the most part though the process is going to be relatively similar if there's something dramatically different i'll try to mention it so that you can you know follow along and still make your wine in the correct way i've done some things before i set these wines up here i've brought them up to just under 70 degrees fahrenheit which is a good temperature to get a yeast started it should start okay that being said a white wine is a lot harder to get started than a red wine and there's a few reasons for that first of all the they're much more acidic usually so ph is a measure of the strength of the acids in a wine it's a logarithmic scale so a ph of 3.0 is 10 times more acidic than a ph of 4.0 well a starting red wine might be something like 3.4 well starting white wine you're usually in the 3.0 to 3.2 range so you're substantially more acidic which just makes this microbial process that you're trying to do much harder and that's why you'll see i have this mega yeast starter just a super yeast starter you can see a big head of foam on it and to make a good yeast starter like this i've got a video where i go into great detail but for the most part you're taking some warm water depending on the yeast strain you're looking at anywhere from 95 degrees fahrenheit to 105 degrees fahrenheit for that water hydrate your yeast by adding it and as time goes on you'll start to add some of your juice to that and what you'll end up with is a vigorous starter like this you can even take it one level further and use some yeast rehydration you nutrients like go firm in this case i didn't the yeast that i chose to use here is renaissance fresco you've seen me talk about that in the past it's by far my favorite white wine yeast and actually it's technically a cider yeast but they're all the same species saccharomyces cerveza so cider to wine it's all the same species there's just various different strains that have different favorable characteristics the characteristics of this strain that i really like are its ability to ferment cold without issue and also it's incapable of creating hydrogen sulfide which is a constant battle if you're making a white wine and these wines are so delicate that you just don't want to deal with hydrogen sulfide which can lead to mercaptan which can create this off reductive flavor in your wine that can kind of go a little like garlic or burnt rubber tasting you actually see this a lot in sauvignon blanc so if you love sauvignon blanc you might not hate that taste like i do i've tested the ph on this wine we're sitting at 3.05 so we're right in a good starting point for a white wine if we weren't i might make a subtle adjustment if i want to lift the ph a little bit i'll use potassium bicarbonate or potassium carbonate if i want to drop the ph essentially acidifying it more i would add tartaric acid you never really want to add acid blend to a grape based wine because then you're also adding more malic acid you're adding more citric acid which is not necessarily what you want but you want to start in the range of usually 3.0 to 3.2 ideally as far as sugar content goes again i measured that we are a little bit low i'm looking for about 20 to 21 sugar you can read that on the hydrometer if you look at the scale triple scale hydrometer one of the scales is degrees brix that correlates to percent sugar by weight i will end up pushing the sugar up a little bit by adding some table sugar but i don't really want to add it yes yet because i don't want to agitate this wine more and more and more because what will happen is it'll turn brown on me which is not what i'm going for with this wine to bring up the percent sugar to that 20 to 21 degrees brix or 20 to 21 percent i'm going to add an ounce and a half of table sugar per gallon per degree brix that i want to bring it up so i'll wait until the fermentation is kind of moving along and i'm confident that the wine is has an appetite for air yeast needs a lot of air so once the fermentation is going you can just hammer it with air it's not as big of a deal then i'll mix in that sugar kind of slowly and um bring it up to where i want it to be another thing i'll mention i've also added some pectic enzyme to this i don't want to add that until i'm in juice form you don't want to add it in grape form with white grapes you don't want to add it when you're cold settling you're not trying to extract more out of those skins or anything but what you're trying to do is break up that pectin which is what kind of holds the fruit cells together it's just kind of gelatinous goo that holds these plant cells together and if you don't break that up you can sometimes end up with what's called a pectin haze where your wine has like a haze to it when you go in a bottle and it's just on it's a it's unsightly it doesn't really affect the taste particularly but if you want to have a professional grade wine you really want it to be nice and crystal clear so let's go ahead and get this yeast starter added before it flows over onto my little bar here i'm going to try to get this foam to go down a little bit you can see i'm going to ferment in carbohydrates that's something i commonly do with white wines you can also ferment in buckets if you can get away with it though carboys are nice it kind of helps trap a lot of these volatile aromas that you're really trying to trap it does somewhat starve that wine of air so you're kind of walking the edge so you really want to be somewhat experienced if you're going to starve a wine of air or use a good yeast like the yeast that i'm using that is very air starvation friendly but we'll go ahead and we'll add this yeast starter so so now we're just going to monitor this we're going to keep it at around that you know high 60s even if it gets into the low 70s fahrenheit 7172 until we see visible signs of fermentation so what you're looking for is first of all bubbles out of the airlock second of all uh just froth sometimes you'll see kind of like some foam building up on the surface depending on the strain of yeast that you're using and when it's really going good you'll see kind of it sparkling on top almost with little bubbles and just little bubbles running up the sides it's been just under a day since we've added our yeast starter and we're seeing telltale signs of a good fermentation being kicked off so you see this kind of frothy foam on the top that's completely normal you'll see some bubbles coming out of the air locks and again just very normal stuff you are seeing a little bit of subtle browning so that's enzymatic so when this top layer has a little bit of air these enzymes will somewhat brown the juice luckily that's insoluble so that will fall out of the wine and also be absorbed by the yeast over time so not too much to worry about there you'll see this more on a wine that is relatively low in free sulfur dioxide or sulfite whereas if you buy a juice from someone who's selling you like wine juice on tap they're usually going to sulfite that pretty heavy and you you probably aren't going to see this browning again we're not worried about it at all you see a couple things in front of me now um i've got some sugar because i did mention that i have to make a small sugar addition to this wine and i've got some fermaid k which is some yeast nutrient i've also got some daimonium phosphate which is another type of yeast nutrient these are essentially sources of nitrogen for that yeast you think of yeast as like a living thing like a plant well it's a single celled organism it needs nitrogen to thrive and it can only get so much nitrogen from the juice and sometimes there's just not enough so this kind of gives you an insurance policy to make sure that yeast keeps going good and doesn't start to cause any you know signs of yeast under stress like your hydrogen sulfide i think of ferment k as kind of a slow release gradual nitrogen release like cow manure in the garden and then i think of pure daemonium phosphate as your quick release stuff so this would be like your actual fertilizers or your miracle grow so one of them i is a preventative i use dap more as a reactive if i start to smell that hydrogen sulfide i need to add about 21 ounces of sugar to bring me up to about 21 sugar being that i'm at about um 18 sugar right now so i need to come up about three percent and i mentioned before one and a half ounces per gallon per percent sugar that you want to come up and um you want to come up to you know the 20 to 20 20 to 22 sugars kind of where you want to be for a white wine thing doesn't want to zero there we go and that will make a wine in the you know 11 to 12 percent alcohol range if you let that ferment dry if you have a white wine that's a little bit higher than that not that big a deal but you know if you're gonna get up to where you're producing somewhere around you know 14 alcohol it might be worth considering like a cold crash so that's when you intentionally stall the fermentation towards the end to leave a little bit of residual sugar but it also lowers the alcohol a little bit because that sugar is not being consumed by the yeast so roughly you know if you take your original percent sugar also known as degrees brix on your hydrometer and multiply that by just depends on how how good this particular strand of yeast is at converting sugar to alcohol but multiply it by about 0.55 to 0.57 that will give you an estimation of how much alcohol that wine is going to make now what i can do is pour this right in here but i do want to pour with caution every every must uh or juice must be fermenting juice reacts a little bit different and this kind of adds a place to kind of dissipate those co2 bubbles so i want to make sure i don't accidentally create a bit of a volcano here so just pour just a tiny bit of sugar see how the wine reacts make sure it doesn't start really foaming up bad as that co2 it's already in there starts to bubble out of solution i don't think it will being that this is pretty granulated but you just you just never know we'll give that a little little swirl and right now with this yeast actively fermenting i'm not as concerned about this little bit of air that i'm getting into the wine because um yeast is like so air hungry when a yeast cell uses air it's called uh aerobic respiration so that helps it gain energy helps it bud to create more little yeast cells and it's kind of the opposite of anaerobic respiration which is really also known as alcoholic fermentation when that yeast creates consumes sugar to create um alcohol and carbon dioxide yeah so our volcano risk is pretty low here probably should have used a funnel little bit of air like i said will really help get that yeast moving along but i don't want to do it before fermentation too hard because i don't want to completely brown this juice that would be a whole different style the sugar is pretty well dissolved now i'll give it a few more swirls just to make sure that it doesn't settle out on the bottom on us and right now i'm dissolving a little bit of the furmaid k in water and what the packet will tell you is add one gram per gallon at one third sugar depletion that's when the yeast really starts to deplete usually the naturally available nitrogen and it just kind of helps make sure that that wine is going to get through to the end i don't like to add nutrient before fermentation kicks off because i'm just afraid that i'm going to feed whatever wild yeast strains or wild bacteria may have come in on that must once the fermentation is moving along though wine yeast is really the most competitive thing that can really live in here so things are moving along you can be pretty sure that it's wine yeast that's doing its business in here so i can feel okay to feed it we're not all the way to one-third sugar depletion but we are like i said very actively moving along with the fermentation so i'm just going to go ahead and add the fermaid k again be a little bit careful especially if you're going to try to add this in dry form to this that you don't get a uh a volcano it's usually a little bit better if you dissolve it in a little bit of water like i did here give it another swirl and we are aerating it to some extent while doing this but i said it's not a big deal it's actually kind of a good thing at this stage in the fermentation when that yeast is really trying to multiply on us and we'll let this go at basically room temperature for another half a day probably just make sure it's really really a good healthy start to the fermentation and then what we're going to do is chill it down a little bit i like to ferment my white wines personally in the 55 to 60 range now that's going to require a yeast that can handle that and there are very very few that can handle it really really well but you know even if you can get into the 65 degrees fahrenheit range that's going to be helpful so by fermenting cool you're doing a couple things you're helping to preserve the natural aromas of that grape so the varietal character of that grape but also you're promoting that yeast or encouraging that yeast to create these fruity esters and it's not something you usually want to do in a red wine but in a white wine those are generally favorable characteristics it kind of makes that white wine a little bit more i don't know complex on the nose a little bit fruitier it's a little more exciting and you drink a white wine younger so those esters produced by the yeast are still usually present at the time that you're drinking this wine as long as you're drinking it within about two years if you're fermenting your white wine cool it usually takes around three weeks maybe four weeks for the fermentation to complete this is a different white wine that i've got going this is a riesling and you can see that it's stopped bubbling it's even starting to clear up a little bit and if you measure it with a hydrometer you'll see a number like 0.996 or if you're measuring on the brick scale something like negative 1.5 and that's a good indication that this wine is done fermenting so right now the headspace is filled with carbon dioxide produced during fermentation but it's a little bit risky to leave it like that indefinitely as this wine expands and contracts it can suck a bubble backwards through these airlocks and ultimately you'll end up with this mixture of co2 and air which will oxidize these wines so we need to get it into a topped up carboy and we're going to rack it into a three gallon and put the excess into either one gallon carboys or growlers half gallon growlers another thing we're going to do when we rack it is we're going to hit it with some sulfur dioxide which we get in the form of potassium metabisulfite and if we don't do that the wine is going to turn brown on us it's going to oxidize and it's also going to try to go through malolactic fermentation which is normally not something you want to do on a white wine except for in the rare occasion of something like a chardonnay so go ahead and we'll get this racking cane started and what i'm going to do is just hit this with a little pressure i'll use a nitrogen tank i've got here to start it you can start with your mouth if you want there's really nothing that can live in your mouth that can live in this wine i know it sounds gross or what i used to do is you fill the racking cane with water and put your finger over the end and bring it down and let the water flow into a cup and once the wine gets down to the bottom put that into the the vessel that you're racking into to start it with pressure well i like to stick these little orange cap things on you can stick your hand around it and try to make a seal but it can be a little tricky and then just turn my tank on here give it a little hit and there you go see the wine flowing you could actually blow into this hole if you wanted as well i mentioned that i'm adding some sulfur dioxide i'm adding about 80 parts per million which is a pretty high dose that's 80 parts from per million free so2 and that's going to carry us through as this wine sits and ages and we probably won't have to hit it again at all you can just put it straight into bottle without sulfiting again by the time you go to bottle you'll probably find that that number is now closer to 30 parts per million the stuff really likes to react 80 parts per million comes out to about 1.6 grams of potassium metabisulfite per three gallons and if you're wondering how i got to that basically one milligram per liter is equal to one part per million and potassium metabisulfite is about 57 free sulfur dioxide now that this is in a topped up carboy we can let this sit until it becomes crystal clear which usually takes about with a white wine usually about three months don't be shocked if it does take a little bit longer that can happen so don't be too worried but what i'll do is i'll store it in a nice cool dark place for that to happen and really that's going to be about it once the wine turns crystal clear you have a few options you can bottle it right then and there or you can think about doing things like back sweetening which is when you're going to add a little bit of sugar back to that wine so it tastes just like how maybe you want it to taste and the only thing i'll recommend if you're going to do that is you're going to want to stabilize it with potassium sorbate so it doesn't try to re-ferment those new sugars in the bottle to stabilize with potassium sorbate you have to once again make sure that one's crystal clear rack it off whatever leaves have settled out and then add the potassium sorbate and you're going to add one half teaspoon per gallon and that's it's not going to kill the yeast it's not going to stop an active fermentation but what it's going to do is it's going to coat any little yeast cells that might have somehow figured out a way to get through so that they don't bloom into a larger population of yeast there's usually millions of yeast cells per milliliter so the yeast is really going to be there even if you tried a sterile filter unless you have a really really good sterile filtration setup like what they might have at a winery just assume that there's going to be a couple row yeasts that get through and if you want to leave residual sugar plan on using potassium sorbate i hope this is exactly what you needed to know to get that white wine started and finished from juice if you have any more questions make sure to mention them down in the comments section below and i'll try to answer whatever i can thanks for watching

Channel: The Home Winemaking Channel

Views: 37,491

Keywords: Wine, winemaking, home winemaking, winery

Id: DanRKsjKODM

Length: 26min 15sec (1575 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021