Wine Newb

I am a beer brewer and my wife is a wine drinker. We would like to try our hand(s) at a batch of wine. She would like to make a blackberry or raspberry, or mixed berry wine.

I have 2 questions at this point.

(1) can anyone recommend a good research or tutorial book or website that will help me through the process, and
(2) can anyone recommend a good kit for this type of wine?

I appreciate your help and input.

Steve

I love making wine, been doing it for years before I got into brewing. My suggestion is work with a couple of the kits first to wrap your head around the process.

If you really like the sweet berry I would go with the WinExpert Pom Zinf kit. It's cheap, easy to make, and will be ready for those summer patio drinking days.

Once you've got a few kits under your belt then go for making wine from berries/fruits. Once you do you'll really want to spend a few days reading Jack Keller's Wine Blog. http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/

I make my yearly run to the pick-your-own farms for strawberries, blackberries, cherries and blueberries. Each of those make fabulous wines. Just remember one thing: If you think brewing beer takes patience wine requires that level 10 fold. Those berry wines don't become drinkable until about 1 year, and really come in to their own around 2-3 years.

Look for the author Terry Garey. The art of home wine making Is the book. It's a great fruit wine starter level book. She doesn't over complicate things and it has a ton of recipes.

Thank you both for your help.

Why not just look up a recipe here on this site and go from there.

Wine can be that simple, to start. As you get more into it, then you can move to a "DIY" wine book.

IMO, I think the process needs to be honed before the recipe gets tweaked.

The Wine expert kits are the way to go based on what you've described. there are 6-8 different fruity flavors. The instructions are easy to follow and they are ready to drink in about a month. over the years I've made all of them and the Pom Zin and Green Apple Ries are the 2 that I get the most requests for (I give them as gifts a lot).

Does wine need to be fermented in a glass carboy, or can I use a plastic fermenting bucket?
Also, I saw that someone recommended using 1/2 or 3/4 of the F-Pack and adding extra sugar. Does anyone else here recommend this?

BTW, my previous post was in regard to Pin Sin.

*Sin
There"ll be no sinning.

*Zin

Stupid autocorrect.

I only use plastic primary fermenters... I have done over 2,400 batches ( I own a vint on premise) in the last 8 months. So I would say they are fine

Stick to the kits instructions first. Figure out if you like the taste, then after a few batches you can start to experiment.

And yeah; Plastic buckets and better bottles rocks. No need for glass at all. I appreciate my fingers/hands too much

Scott, I don't know how I survived before Better Bottle.. After trying one we ordered 200 of them.

Edit: *100*

I made the Black Raspberry Merlot kit. Today was day 6 and I checked the SG, which was 0.996. It was supposed to be 1.010 or lower.

The SG is at the level it should be after the secondary fermentation period. I'm supposed to leave it for 10 days until it reaches its current gravity level.

My question is, should I check the SG in 2 days and if it is the stable, just move on to step 3, or leave it in the secondary for the full 10 days?

Thanks

at day 6 you're still in the Primary vessel, you're bucket, right?

And you're secondary is a Carboy?

The reason you ferment the wine in the bucket is because the krausen forming on top would spill out the carboy and you typically worry less about infection/O2 oxidization because of the mass amounts of CO2 coming off.

Racking into the secondary gets the wine off the yeast bed and into a container with very limited headspace. You'll need to make sure you have something handy to top off the carboy with if it doesn't reach up to about 1" from the bottom of the stopper. for this type of wine anything would work, even a cheap bottle of white Zin or something.

The trick is to get it racked to the Carboy when there's enough off-gassing left to fill that little airspace with CO2.

How long it sits in the secondary is up to you; this kit is back sweetened enough to be consumed young -- so youre really just waiting for fermentation to totally end so you can degass, clarify, stabilize, and back-sweeten per the instructions.


the Short answer? If your SG is that low after 6 days then you can absolutely move from bucket to carboy -- just let it sit in the secondary an extra few days to make up the time. While these sweet kits are good green 30+ days after fermentation makes them super tasty.

I racked it the secondary today.
I am using a plastic fermenter because I don't have, or like glass carboys.
There is about 2 inches, or more, of headspace in the fermented bucket. I have a 1.5 L bottle of Merlot I can add if you think it's best.
I'll check the SG in 2-3 days. If it's the same, I'll move on two step 3.

Is it supposed to taste like wine at this point? I hope not.

scurry64 said:

I racked it the secondary today.
I am using a plastic fermenter because I don't have, or like glass carboys.
There is about 2 inches, or more, of headspace in the fermented bucket. I have a 1.5 L bottle of Merlot I can add if you think it's best.
I'll check the SG in 2-3 days. If it's the same, I'll move on two step 3.

Is it supposed to taste like wine at this point? I hope not.

Click to expand...

You don't want to top up yet, as the degassing comes before topping up.

Follow the instructions exactly. Those wine kits are really good, but they must be made according to the instructions for them to really work out that well.

You can use plastic, that's fine, but it should NOT be a bucket with wide headspace. It must be a carboy, 6 gallon size, and not a bucket at this point.

Do you want to leave the wine on the yeast for the same reasons you want to leave beer on it? Ie, to clean up off flavors, etc? Or is it different for wine?

Are campden tablets really necessary? Something feels icky about putting chemicals into the must even before fermentation...

bk0 said:

Do you want to leave the wine on the yeast for the same reasons you want to leave beer on it? Ie, to clean up off flavors, etc? Or is it different for wine?

Are campden tablets really necessary? Something feels icky about putting chemicals into the must even before fermentation...

Click to expand...

No, you don't want to leave it on the lees. Remember that with beer, the "clean up" happens in less than 48 hours and those that choose to leave their beer longer may have yeasty character in their beers (which can be pleasing). But wine lees are not great flavored, and aging "sur lie" (on the lees) is only done in specific circumstances along with stirring.

You don't use campden until packaging with wine kits. But when you mix up must from unpasteurized fruit and things, it's a necessity to knock out wild yeast/bacteria from spoiling the wine before fermentation can begin.

Thanks for all the advice. Toy folks make this much easier for newbs.

scurry64 said:

Toy folks make this much easier for newbs.

Click to expand...

??????

Autocorrect?

Man I hate autocorrect.

You, not toy.