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| Great wines start with great grapes, but a serviceable wine can be made with grocery store ingredients and without special equipment. Photo by Brad Sylvester, all rights reserved. |
Homemade wine is something many people want to try, but may seem too intimidating to try on your own. This recipe is easy, cheap and nearly fool-proof. The best part is that like the little pop-up buttons on store bought turkeys, there's a nearly fool-proof indicator to let you know when that it's brewing properly and when the wine is complete and ready to taste. This recipe yields one gallon of a sweet white wine
Equipment list:
1 gallon milk jug, cleaned and sanitized
1 large latex balloon - new, uninflated
household bleach for sanitizing
kitchen funnel (optional - but very helpful)
a paper coffee filter (optional)
Ingredients:
4 cups of sugar (2.2 pounds)
23 ounce (2 cans) of Welch's White Grape Juice, frozen concentrate
1-2 packets of bread yeast (0.75 ounce each)
tap or bottled water, unchlorinated (approximately 6 cups)
Sanitize everything!
Before we get started, let's talk about the difference between clean and sanitized. Your dishes are clean after you hand wash them, they are sanitized if your dishwasher has a steam clean feature. Your countertops are clean, but not sanitized. It is important that everything that is going to touch your wine ingredients is sanitized. The process of turning raw ingredients into wine is called fermentation and it involves creating a perfect environment for bacteria and fungus to grow. That means that any such contaminants that may be on the utensils or containers you use will have an opportunity to grow and grow and grow. While the building alcohol in your fermenting wine will probably eventually kill anything that might have snuck in rendering it relatively harmless in most cases. Chances are that they will survive long enough to make your wine taste like swill. In some cases, completely undrinkable. Sanitize everything. It's easy and quick. If you follow the directions given by the CDC for sanitizing surfaces that will come into contact with food after they have been exposed to flood waters, you should be all set. Basically, just wash everything well with soap and water, then mix one teaspoon of household bleach into one gallon of water. Rinse everything in the diluted bleach solution. Make sure every surface is thoroughly wetted. Pour off any excess bleach solution and allow all items to air dry. This doesn't work with wood or other porous materials, but should work perfectly for plastic, glass or metal items.
Preparing the Wine:
Pour two cans of Welch's White Wine Grape Juice concentrate into the one gallon milk jug. Using a dry, but sanitized kitchen funnel (if you have one) add four cups of sugar to the grape juice concentrate. Fill the remaining space in the jug with water. Leave about an inch between the top of the liquid and the mouth of the jug. Stir with a sanitized implement until the sugar is completely dissolved. This may take a while. When you finish stirring, check to see if any undissolved sugar settles back to the bottom. If so, stir some more.
When the sugar has completely dissolved, add 1 packet of ordinary bread yeast. Just pour it gently into the jug and let it sit undisturbed on top of the liquid for about 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, stir the yeast into the liquid.
Finally, stretch the opening of the latex balloon so that it fits over the mouth of the milk jug like a hat. It should completely cover and seal the opening. Store the milk jug in a warm area out of the sun, and try to keep it between 68 and 74 degrees Fahrenheit.
Why the Balloon?
As the yeast does its job of converting the sugars to alcohol, it also releases carbon dioxide. If the jug were sealed with a regular cap, this would result in increasing pressure and might even burst the jug. The balloon, however, stretches to accommodate the volume of the CO2. Over a period of several days, you should notice the balloon beginning to inflate. It most likely won't get very big, but it should be quite noticeable. After a period of 1-2 weeks, the balloon should deflate once more. This means that the basic fermentation is complete and the yeast is no longer giving off CO2 gas. The pressurized CO2 that had built up has slowly escaped through the balloon membrane or even through the plastic of the jug itself.
At this point, the wine is essentially done. I like to use a paper coffee filter in a kitchen funnel to filter the wine. It may be a little cloudy and have some residue from the yeast. This can easily be filtered with an ordinary coffee filter. When pouring it from the milk jug through the filter into whatever sanitized bottles you want to use, move the milk jug carefully and pour it slowly so that the sediment is not disturbed from the bottom of the jug and doesn't get poured along with the good stuff.
Bread yeast is not designed for wine fermentation and especially not for brewing strong wines. That means that the yeast has most likely died of alcohol poisoning long before it converted all the available sugar. It is most likely very sweet and somewhat weaker than wines you might buy in the store.
Preparing the Wine Part II, Second Fermentation
If you like your wine stronger, then after the first fermentation is complete, you can simply add another packet of yeast, allow it fifteen minutes to sit, and then stir it in as before. Cover the milk jug with a balloon as you did with the first fermentation. Put the jug aside for another weeks or two. The deflated balloon will tell you when it's done. The new yeast will survive long enough to convert more of the sugar to alcohol at the price of reducing the sweetness of the final product.
Bread Yeast, Really?
Another by-product of using bread yeast instead of a specially cultured wine yeast is the aroma. Bread yeast may result in an off-smell and a taste that definitely has some overtones of freshly baked bread. I'll experiment with different yeast varieties to see just how good we can get with this same basic recipe using yeast that is cultured specifically for use in wine fermentation. Good wine yeast costs something like 2 or 3 dollars per batch online and can make a tremendous difference in the quality of the final product.
How Much Alcohol is in This Homemade Wine?
Your mileage may vary depending upon the efficacy of the yeast you have, the temperature at which the wine is stored, the mineral content of your water, and just plain luck, but my most recent batch tested out at 13% alcohol by volume after a second round of fermentation. Prior to adding the yeast, the mixture registered enough sugar to equate to 21% alcohol by volume if 100 percent of the sugar were to be converted. That means that there is still a significant amount of unfermented sugar in the finished product, leaving the wine quite sweet.
Cost of Homemade Wine
This recipe produces one gallon of wine which equals five 750 ml bottles of wine minus a little bit of waste for the sediment. My total cost for the ingredients is about $1.44 per bottle. If you're a wine snob, not that there's anything wrong with that, then you most likely won't prefer this to your usual fare, but for $1.43 and the opportunity to say you made it yourself, it's at least as good as any bottle of $6.99 wine at the supermarket.
Of course, with a little more equipment and some better ingredients, it is quite possible to make much, much better wines at home, but that's a discussion for another day.
If you tried this at home, let us know how your batch turned out in the comment section below.
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