Joy of Home Wine Making (10 page)

There is no easy way to gauge this, of course, but the hydrometer gives you a pretty good chance. Generally, two and a half pounds of added sugar per gallon will give you a dry wine, and three pounds of added sugar per gallon will give you a sweet wine. Be sure you dissolve the sugar or honey well before you measure.

By the way, it is always easier to make a dry wine and sweeten it up than it is to hope that the yeast has eaten all the extra sugar you thought it might. Did it eat the sugar, and leave you with a sweet wine that has finished fermenting for sure, or do you have a potential for cork blowing here because the fermentation stuck or the yeast wasn’t quite up to par? Maybe there was more sugar
in the fruit than you thought. Chances are it’s OK, but chances are chances. Ferment it out, THEN sweeten.

When taking a reading of any must or wine, remove it from the main lot with a sanitized wine thief and use a thermometer to find out the temperature of the liquid.

Numbers can be our friends. Don’t let them get a stranglehold, that’s all. We are making wine, not the secret formula to cure the common cold (alas).

Don’t put the wine or must back in the fermenter. Toss it out. There are just too many things that can go wrong between getting the wine out and measuring it. Better to waste half a cup or so than to contaminate your wine.

DON’T FORGET TO WRITE DOWN THE PA!

Water tension causes your reading to look higher than it really is. You want to look at where the water level is just to the sides of the stem. Otherwise you could be as much as one-half degree off. This is not really critical unless you are trying to decide if the fermentation is done, and then it is critical!

T
HERMOMETER

Very useful; not totally essential. They don’t cost much. Get a cute little floating thermometer so you can tell how warm or cool your must is. This helps you make more accurate PA and SG readings (remember temperature of the must affects the reading),
and it lets you know that the must has cooled down enough to add the yeast. It also helps you judge how warm the temperature is for your primary and secondary fermenting.

As always, keep it clean! Sanitize the thermometer before putting it in any must or wine. Rinse it off immediately afterward, as well.

S
CALES

Scales are indispensable in winemaking.

A pound of sugar is roughly two cups. Easy to remember most of the time. However, it can get tricky when measuring out cups in practice and in your mind. The bigger the amount you are using, the more chance you will have of being off enough to create a result that is different from what you were expecting. Nothing like losing count in the middle of fifteen cups!

Fruit is not conveniently shaped. Some fruits have more juice than others, and are thus heavier. One batch of four cups of peaches might well weigh more or less than the next. This is why I always specify the weight of the fruit to use.

My winemaking life became much easier when I went out and bought a kitchen scale that can weigh items up to ten pounds. It cost fifteen dollars. I use it for cooking and canning, too. I highly recommend that you get one. A good hardware store or a good wine supply store will carry them. Don’t get the tiny twelve-ounce postal scale, unless you want to measure chemicals (or letters).

M
EASURING
C
UPS AND
S
POONS

Use glass or plastic; avoid metal if you can. Try to keep your winemaking supplies separate from your cooking utensils. This is not so much out of concern about the poisonous aspects of any winemaking chemicals as about a strange roast beef or garlic flavor appearing in the wine.

C
HEMICAL
J
ARS
and B
OTTLES

You need a pint or quart bottle with a good lid to store your sulphite solution. My friend at the lab gave me a nice official-looking brown one. Be sure to label the bottle with the words
POISON and DO NOT DRINK, and put a Mr. Ick face on it if you have small children around.

Mr. Ick

Then keep it out of sight and out of reach of any children or pets or curious adults who might wander by. Do not put it in a food cupboard.

Keep your chemicals in plastic bags or bottles and keep them labeled and in a safe place, too. Don’t take chances.

B
OILING
P
OT

If you have a nice five-gallon stainless steel pot, use it! You can use any steel or enamel pot to boil water and sugar in. If you have to do it in batches, well, that’s OK. Don’t use aluminum in winemaking: the acids in the fruits will react to it adversely.

LOCATION, OR WHERE AM I GOING TO PUT ALL THIS STUFF?

Bottled wine must be stored on its side to keep the cork from drying out and shrinking. You can get into all sorts of discussions
about exactly what angle and all is right, but the most important thing is to keep it on its side. It needs to be kept cool (under 60°F is best), quiet, and away from direct sunlight and weird chemicals.

Fermenting wine should also be kept cool and away from light. You can always wrap a cloth around it, or put a heavy paper sack over it.

So where to put your wine, and all the other stuff that goes with it? That depends on how far you get into winemaking and how much space you have to begin with.

It’s best to keep your equipment all in one place that is easy to get at, clean, and out of the way. I keep all my corks and small pieces (like hydrometers, packaged yeasts, and chemicals) in little plastic bins on a shelf in a hallway outside the kitchen. This is because I do most of my primary fermentation in the kitchen.

The big stuff and all the bottles and jugs are in the basement, because that’s where I store and clean everything, and that’s where the wine lives.

If you live in a small place, look for a cupboard or closet that is someplace quiet, to store supplies and equipment. It really doesn’t take much space. Try to keep as much of them in one place as possible, and keep them away from pets, children, and other things that could contaminate them (like paint thinner).

Is there a door that is always open that has some space behind it? Put up a few shelves.

Bottles and fermenting wine do take up space. You can tuck fermenting wine behind doors, sofas, standing screens, or, if you use mostly one-gallon jugs, in an old cupboard. You can build or adapt an old canning cupboard in the basement by fitting it with sturdier shelves and a door or heavy curtain.

Empty wine bottles can be put in cardboard wine boxes and stacked in all sorts of places. It doesn’t matter if the place is hot or cold.

For the finished wine itself, a basement is ideal, if you have one, and as long as it doesn’t freeze.

Some people have beautiful temperature-controlled cellars fitted with thermometers and bins and cubes and racks. Others have workmanlike racks or stacks of individual cubes, which use space economically and look fine.

I have a series of wide shelves (which should be sturdier but aren’t) on which I have cardboard wine cartons from the liquor
store lying on their sides. I lay the wine bottles in the separate compartments in the boxes. I don’t dare stack them more than one box high. On the floor below, I have stacked large batches of bottles on their sides in wooden packing cases, bottle on top of bottle, the way I’ve seen it done in French cellars. I also keep my empties down near the floor, as well, sorted by size, color, and shape. The temperature of my cellar ranges from 45°F in the winter to 80°F (occasionally) in the summer. The temperature fluctuations are never rapid, because of the thick limestone foundation, so I just don’t worry about it. One works with what one has.

A modest array of five-gallon carboys and one-gallon jugs of various wines aging and waiting to be bottled, tucked into an unused corner of the basement. The pie cherry wine was the wine racked earlier, and needs topping up, whilst the three light-colored wines are vying for the honor of being used as the bad example. The peach wine won.
If any of these wines had still been fermenting, I would have them in a warmer place! Note the high tech record book close to hand for making notes and observations.

Occasionally I find in a catalog a nice wine storage system made of dwelling or long rectangular bars, but when I calculate how much it will cost to take care of all the bottles in my cellar, my gorge rises.

One day I’ll rev up the saw, measure everything in sight, and do something about it, or maybe hire or trade for a carpenter to do it.

I have lots of room to spare, so it really doesn’t matter. Most people don’t. But if you look at the photo, you will see that half of the area shown could fit in a closet quite easily.

To store wine in an apartment, the best way is to dedicate part of your coolest closet to sturdy wooden shelving, and use the cardboard wine box method. You can get sixty or more bottles in even a tiny closet and still hang winter coats and the like in front of them, as long as you hang a sheet of plastic in front of the bottles to protect the coats from the occasional spouting cork and gush of wine.

A cupboard near the floor also works, if you don’t mind kneeling down and reaching back into it. Or you can create a false shallow cupboard in a wide hallway that will allow you to hide the wine from dust and light and still accommodate other things on top of it.

Part of my wine cellar. In the space between the two uprights, which is six feet by six feet, I have about 100 bottles of wine, a lot of empties, jugs, some beer, homemade liqueurs, mustard pickles which have edged over into the space, and my Art Deco bottle capper. There’s a lot of wasted space, of course. Half that area, say three feet wide by six feet tall in a cupboard or closet, fitted with better shelves could hold almost the same amount, especially if you put the pickles and the beer elsewhere. Temperature fluctuates between 45° F and 80° F over the course of a year.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ingredients

A
lways use the best fruit, vegetables, herbs, flowers, grains, spices, you can afford. ALWAYS.