Wine Making: Part 1

[Music] hello friends heidi here from rain country god is good all the time and i'm here today to re-shoot part one of my wine making series so some of you who are new might not realize i already have a whole series out there but i need to redo this video for several reasons one because the first one in that series was of this and that so i wanted focus just on the wine making but i have some more information and details i would like to throw into this first video now i did go ahead and get the wine going yesterday so what i did with my grapes this year and i find it's the easiest thing so if you're making your wine from grapes i'm going to be talking about other juices but if you're making it from your own homegrown grapes or grapes of any kind i find it easiest to freeze the grapes first and then to juice them now there's many different ways you can juice your grapes i've tried several different ways the first years that i was growing the grapes and juicing them i tried the cooking process and that was fine but it does change the flavor and the color of the juice when you do that and then you're not keeping it raw and then another year when i made wine it was a two three years ago i did it using the grapes straight from the vines i juiced them up and that made a really great wine so one thing i did discover is that keeping them in their raw form is just going to give you a better flavor all around then last year i tried using my cider press to press them out and i did them fresh from the vine and i wasn't really super happy with the results on that it was okay i decided i didn't want to use the the cider press it's fine for my apples i'm not going to use it for my grapes anymore by freezing the grapes first i find not only are they easier to mash and get the juice out you just seem to get a lot more juice out of them in that process so what patrick did for me a few years ago was he made me this to be my fruit masher because i wanted something more solid than a potato masher and i like to put the grapes in my dutch oven and then just mash them up like that to start with now some different ways you can do it is after you do that you can then put the pulp into a cheese cloth and then squeeze it out as best as you can like you would for making cheese i've done that before but this year what i did as you can see in the pictures and the video clips was i just took my my batter ball my stainless steel mesh strainer put it over the top put the pulp right in there and that's after mashing it pretty good with this i used both this and my bare hands i found using my bare hands was actually the most effective to really work that juice out so just when you think of the old italian way of doing things they stomp the grapes with their bare feet so i just got my hands in there and really needed the pulp and i found i could get a lot more juice out doing it that way but the masher was still helpful to initially break it up bust open those grapes and get them ready for mashing and that does still get a lot of juice out and then i'd still uh push the pulp down into the strainer this way to get more out both ways seem to work really good but i'm finding i really like the hands-on method best i've never done a five gallon carboy but that's one way you can do it if you want to just do one big batch at a time i prefer doing smaller one gallon batches back here i have three different types of meat going i just always done it that way so each batch i can do a different flavor or if one doesn't turn out as good as the other though i've never actually had a failed batch of mead or wine i have had some that just don't taste near as good as others and so by doing it one gallon at a time i'm not wasting a whole five gallon cardboard of juice doing it that way and it's not a waste because even if it doesn't have a great taste i'll talk about that in a minute so when you're talking about your gallon for my method of wine making all you're going to need is about three quarts of juice because the rest of it's going to pretty much be taken up with sugar and your fermentation starter so the fermentation starter i have several videos on how to make it i have one that's only like 55 seconds long and then i have one that is 24 minutes long it's very in-depth talking about the different types of sugars you can use and fruits and herbs that you can use how to do it how to refresh it and the many ways that you can use the fermentation starter so i'll be linking to that very in-depth video down below so i recommend if you haven't made your fermentation starter yet you need to watch that one first get that going because it's going to take three to four days for it to be ready for making your wine you're still going to need sugar to add to your juice when you're talking wine making you don't have to use raw fresh juice to make wine you can use store-bought frozen juice even in the cans just make sure you get the proper amount of water in there but you're still going to need if they don't have any sugar added to them you're still going to need sugar added to that juice in order to make a good wine so in my first part one video when i was talking about it i was talking about adding three cups of sugar right from the start now if your juice this is one of the things i needed to clear up if your juice is a very sweet kind of juice maybe you're making it from a totally different kind of fruit because it doesn't have to be grapes or even a great blend i've made wine from just straight apple cider and that turned out pretty good so depending on how sweet your juice is that's gonna play into how much sugar you should add from the start now in that first video i said three cups well that is because my grapes are very tart there's hardly any sweetness in them typically when you're talking wine grapes that's what you're gonna get anyway so sugar really needs to be added and you need more sugar for something that's very tart so i add three cups of sugar to this right from the start now if your juice is very sweet i would say only start with two cups and what i recommend you do before you fill up your your one gallon jugs mix the sugar in with some of the juice first then also add your one cup of fermentation starter because with the fermentation starter you're going to strain out the fruit or the herbs like this one is herbs you're going to strain those out you're just using the liquid so you're going to put one cup of that in there you don't want your juice if you're heating it at all like maybe you're doing the cook method or the steaming method to juice you don't want it hot when you add your fermentation starter so make sure it's at room temperature before you add the fermentation starter and i recommend adding that in like mix it in your batter bowl first so maybe you're only doing eight cups at a time then pour that into your jug then from that point add your juice up to about the the level you see here you want to leave room to add at least another cup of sugar this is why you don't want it all the way up here now coming back to why you don't want to put all the sugar in from the start you can actually prevent it from fermenting at all or it's going to take a much longer time for it to get bubbly and this was the other thing i wanted to clear up is then i wouldn't go any farther than two weeks into the process when you go to add that next cup of sugar whether it be you started with two or three cups doesn't matter i recommend only adding one more cup of sugar to that i recommend a good blonde organic cane sugar for that you can use any kind of sugar really uh if you're going to use honey that's called mead that's different that's what's back here and i have a video just on mead making and that video is in the playlist the whole wine making playlist that i'll be linking down below i still recommend sticking with a good cane sugar you want to try to go with something you want to make sure it's non-gmo and if and organic is going to be better and just keep it simple don't get carried away trying to add a bunch of fancy sugars in there like coconut sugar and all that besides too much minerals can also stop her slower from rent so sticking with just you know my favorite is the organic blonde cane sugar that you can get at costco for a pretty good price so when you go to add that next cup of sugar what you're going to want is to make sure that wine is very fizzy you got a lot of air bubbles coming through your airlock and i'll show a close-up right here you can see you want those air bubbles coming through fairly quickly and make sure it's doing that for a few days then add your next cup of sugar now that could be right at the one week point one thing i have found that when it comes to vinegar or wine sometimes you can add sugar at the two week point and it's fine but sometimes it can slow it down too much and then your fermentation just stops so you don't want to add sugar too late into the process some people will say two weeks i say one week should be good as long as it's been very fizzy and bubbly for at least a few days so that's what i do now now again i just started this yesterday so there's a few bubbles in there but it hasn't really started to get fizzy or bubbly i don't have air bubbles coming through here like i do on my meads back here that have been going the uh this one back here has been going for at least a week and the other two this one's about done it's been almost a month and then that one's been going for a couple weeks so let me talk a little bit about the airlock though yes you can use a balloon if you don't have an airlock don't have a money to buy an airlock you want to make sure it's a good strong latex balloon will work i don't prefer that method i tried it the first time i know what part of the issue was was i was making a strawberry mead and the pulp ended up working its way up inside the balloon and then back down into the wine and it made the strawberry mead taste like latex it was really gross after that i decided to purchase airlocks they're really inexpensive and i did find a link where you can get the set you can actually get a set with a jug the drilled stopper and the airlock all in one so i'll link to that but if you don't need the the gallon jugs because maybe you're you've been recycling them from old cheap wine or getting them from friends or finding them at garage sales because you can do that then i will also link to our set where you can get the drilled stopper and the airlock that's going to the drilled stopper the size is going to matter if you're using one gallon you want to make sure you check and make sure you're getting the right size for one gallon because the first one i bought i wasn't even paying attention was actually made for a five gallon carboy and it's much bigger though yes you can use the balloon method and how that works is balloons are porous enough that it can allow the gases to escape without let allowing oxygen in now it will start to fill up and it will look pretty full while the wine's in the process and when it's done and when it gets deflated then you'll know it's ready some other things about once you get this started is that some people like to just cover it with a cloth for the first few days and then put their air lock on if you're keeping a good eye on it if you've got a lot of pulp in here that's when you really gotta check it all the time because like with these those two meads back there have a lot of pulp because i used blended freeze-dried fruits in it this one not so much because it's just whole vanilla beans in there these ones are going to have a little bit of pulp because even when you're squeezing that out some of that pulp is going to come through there anytime your wines or your meads have a lot of pulp in it you have to keep a good eye on it and this is another reason why at the beginning you don't want this too full because as i said with the strawberry you know you can see a lot more pulp in this one is this pulp as it starts getting bubbly can work its way up into your air your stopper and your airlock and then plug it up and if you're not checking it this this is usually within the first few days this happens and it's only for a couple of days that you really have to concern yourself with this if that happens you're gonna have to take that stopper off there clear everything out make sure you rinse out your your air lock get all the pulp out of that and get all the pulp out of the hole of the stopper because if you don't do that those gases are going to keep building up in here and they're not able to come out through the airlock and the top will blow off and you'll have a mess all over your kitchen that happened to me a year or so ago where i had one it fermented a lot quicker i just started that day and in the middle of the night it was already getting very bubbly and a bunch of pulp had clogged up the stopper and it blew its top in the middle of the night and i had a mess all over my kitchen and all over my ceiling my ceiling is still stained up there from that so just to make sure when you get it started you keep a good eye on it especially if you have a lot of pulp in there keeping the level lower will help prevent that though too now one thing i do recommend i'm not doing here just simply because of space but if i only have one or two going at a time a lot of times putting your jugs in a cake pan can be very helpful because even if your airlock doesn't clog up it can still when it gets really active it can still push some of this pulp and juice up and out and run over and then make a mess on your counter right now what i have under here is just some crochet trivets and that will help soak up anything but i just don't have room you can also put towels under there but the cake pans are a really good method to help catch any liquid now it doesn't always happen that way it's just sometimes and like i said if you keep checking it throughout the day in that first several days is when it's most when you have to most be concerned with it getting active and going and going berserk on you i'm going to prolong putting this video up because i want to take some a series of photos of this wine as it's developing so you see the color it's a it's almost an olive green kind of color and it's just not very pretty but when i made that wine from my fresh grapes a few years ago it started out the color was a little different it was a little greener than this but it was still i didn't get any pictures of it because i was like oh this is just ugly and i didn't think to take any pictures from the start but here is what the finished product looked like so as you can see it turned out to be a very beautiful wine at the end so when you first make that and you're looking at the color and you're thinking man is that is that the way it's going to look no typically what happens and here's another image here of some of two different batches of the apple wine that i was making they were started at different times i think they were about a week apart and you can see that one is much lighter than the other when i first make the apple cider and then start to turn it to wine it has almost the same color not not quite so so ugly but it's a lot darker a little more brown but in the fermentation process it starts to turn a golden color and it it brightens up quite a bit and then the finished product looks much like the grape wine that i made so i'm hoping right in here that i'll to put in this series of photos so you can see what it looks like when it gets started as the colors start to change then i'll take some more photos and show them back to back so you can see the progression of how they look now probably not going to take photos clear up to the end because i am going to want to get this video done and uploaded but at least within the week you should see a difference in the color and so that's what i'm hoping to show you right there one of the things i wanted to throw into this video that i don't have in that series at all if you're wanting to know the percentage of the alcohol in your wine you'll need the pitcher because it needs to be tall and skinny and then you need your hydrometer and how this works is that and this is what i did yesterday is you fill up your little pitcher your little jar here with the wine after you add the sugar but before you add your starter and you want to fill it to about right here you'll know when you go to add the hydrometer if you've got it too full you want it you want it full enough that the hydrometer can float freely in the wine and then you're going to draw you're going to carefully drop the hydrometer in there and then give it a spin so if there's any air bubbles on here that's going to loosen up the air bubbles when you're first starting your wine the less alcohol there is in the wine and the more sugar the higher this is going to float and then what you do is you read your percentage on there it will give you an estimator per alcohol percentage and that's what you're going to read so when i started off with this it read as 10 and then i just poured it back in there i you know i'm not going to waste that and then what you do is you test it again and so you fill it up again with the finished product and do the same process where you put this in and you're gonna find it's sinking lower it might sink down to one percent or zero percent and what that what you do there is you take the difference so ten let's say it's it says one percent so ten minus one would mean my finished product would be nine percent now i haven't done this from beginning to the end so i don't know yet i only just for the first time use this yesterday and i did measure this one even though it's finished and i hadn't measured it before and this is a mead i was curious at how strong it is and i i can only assume it's at least 10 based on the measurement i got and comparing it to this and i would venture a guess that when i let my my meads and my wines finish all the way through i get an average of 10 to 12 percent alcohol content i'm pretty sure i've had some that have had as much as 15. so anyway if you want if that's important for you to know the alcohol content then you i recommend getting a hydrometer so i'm going to start using this from now on just so i can get an idea especially if your plan for using your wines is for barter you may want to know what that percentage is before you barter with it or depending on what you're using it in maybe you're going to use it to make extracts and it's important for you to know the alcohol content for me it never really has been that important important i've always just assumed by the taste that they're between 10 and 15 percent one more thing i wanted to cover in this video and make sure if for the rest of this process you check out the rest of this the playlist the series because it's one there's four parts just for this the wine making and then there's some other information i throw out but i brought this particular one out because this one here this was the mango pineapple mead that i made and it's one of the few where i really did not like the flavor of it it didn't turn out at all like what i thought it would i expected this wonderful tropical flavor and to me it tastes it has a stronger alcohol flavor than what i would expect as well it's just not a great flavor so this isn't the kind of wine or meat if you're one that likes to have a glass of wine or mead you know now and then and you like the flavor of it this isn't one that i would do that with if it were me but that doesn't mean if you get a wine or mead that turns out a flavor that you really don't like as long as it's got a good alcohol content it still has many other uses and so in that playlist i'll be linking down below i have a video that's just on the many uses of homemade wine and that's about everything besides just drinking it so that's what this is used for in fact yesterday i made some spaghetti sauce and this got used in both the water for cooking the noodles as well as added to the spaghetti sauce so i tend to add my wines the ones that that where the flavor isn't as good and it's not something i would want to share with someone or barter with someone then those get reserved for those kind of things making medicinal extracts and more so again i recommend you check out that video you don't have to throw out about a wine that might not have a great flavor for just drinking straight from the glass but it can still be excellent for many other uses all right well i hope you enjoyed this video and i cleared up a few more things if you have any other questions go ahead and put them down below but i do recommend check out that whole series because i might be answering your questions in those as well alright well thanks for watching take care and god bless

Channel: Rain Country

Views: 64,090

Keywords: traditional, old-ways, Health, Garden, Frugal, Homesteading, Self-Sustainability, Cooking, DIY, Homemade, natural-living, herbs, prepping, preparedness, food storage, preserving

Id: QHL5p9xzyas

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020