Home Wine Making Recipes - Basic Steps for Making Your First Batch

Of course, getting fruit to ferment and making some kind of alcohol, is not difficult. It is a natural process that can happen with or without our help. There are homemade wine recipes that promise quick results. What they don't mention is that they can be pretty much undrinkable. However, with not much more effort at all, a truly delicious wine can be made at home. Here are the basic tools for a very easy homemade wine recipe using grapes:

• 2 very clean 5 gallon plastic buckets
• Enough grapes to give you 32 oz. of juice when squeezed
• Large piece of cheesecloth
• Potato masher
• Airlock stopper. (This is a cap that allows the carbon dioxide to escape during the bubbling fermentation, but it does not let air into your wine as it is fermenting)
• Wine bottles and corks

Our First in a Series of Wine Making Recipes

1. Boil approximately one and a half gallons of filtered water
2. Turn off heat and add enough grapes so the water level is just above the grapes
3. Let the grapes sit until the grape skins begin to split
4. With a potato masher, press the grapes while they are still in the water
5. Pour the grape pulp and water into the first of your clean 5 gallon buckets
6. While you are letting the mixture cool boil seven and a half cups of sugar in water
7. Add sugar and water to grape pulp mixture
8. Add a single package of yeast. (You may use regular baker's yeast with home wine making recipes, but I recommend using wine making yeast)
9. Close the bucket and attach airlock stopper. This begins first fermentation.
10. Every day, stir the mixture gently, but thoroughly
11. When fermentation is complete (bubbling stops) pour mixture through a cheesecloth filter into your second 5 gallon bucket. Dispose of the pulp in the filter cloth
12. Close container with lid and airlock
13. Every couple of weeks, transfer and filter wine through a coffee filter, to your other cleaned container
14. After the 5th week you may bottle and cork your wine

From Good Wine Making Recipes to Great Homemade Wine

Home wine making recipes share many of the same basic steps, no matter what fruit you are using. The steps I have outlined above will make a tasty little wine, but there are some special wine making tips to go with our wine recipes that will take them from good wines to great wines.

In my next article I will talk about some special advice for fruit wine making.