Want to try wine making

[Henmack]

I have been brewing beer for 25 years. Mostly from kits. It's a fun hobby and I would like to try wine making.

Any suggestions on where I should begin? How much of my beer equipment can I use? (I use buckets and not carboys) I would like to use fresh fruit if possible, but willing to start with kit with juice. Open to any ideas.

 

[krisabsinthe]

I would recommend getting a carboy so you can see when there is sediment and when to rack off. My first wine was Edworts Apfelwein and I like it pretty well. My recent love is Cranberry-blueberry-blackberry juice fermented with Montrachet yeast and back sweetened. But you can get kit juice from your LHBS, my shop is around $60 for a box of juice concentrate. Other than that get some wine bottles (check craigslist for free ones I got 10 cases free) , a hand corker and corks. Wine takes more Time to see it's full potential, but worth the wait. If your in this for the long haul then get a fruit press (LHBS here has them for $200) and if you have some land consider planting some vines, i have 10 Zinfandel plants on order and I'll order more as cash allows before next planting season. But as most wine makers start, walmart always has juice lol.

 

[Yooper]

If you want to use your own fruit and not wine kits, we have quite a few recipes posted in the wine area of the recipes database! I make wine out of apple juice, crabapples, blackberries, cherries, chokecherries, rhubarb, and so on. The only thing you'll need is a correctly sized carboy (match up the batch size with the carboy size), and some bottles, corks and a corker (or rent a corker from a homebrew store if you can!).

 

[Jacob_Marley]

Definitely go with grape wine.
Your greatest chance of good first experience with wine is with grapes.
Fruit wines (which is mostly what I make) are more difficult as all the variables have to be dealt with individually ... whereas grapes are closer to the ideal winemaking fruit for all of their profiles ... sugar, acid, tannin, nutrients, they even have yeast “built-in” on the outside of the skins.
If you fell into a vat of grapes and had a seizure ... in a few weeks you'd have wine.

Definitely get at least one carboy.
More than one secondary vessel definitely makes it easier to rack into clean vessels without introducing excess oxygen contact as you would get with a single carboy - which would require racking to a bucket, cleaning your one carboy, then racking back into it.

You could even use gallon glass jugs ... they have their good and bad points. A bad point is that they are not as resistant to temperature change as the much larger carboy. One of the good points is that they are more flexible when you rack. Racking usually results in just slightly less volume of must/wine which means you have to either top off with something (water, juice, marbles, whatever) OR you can rack to a slightly smaller vessel.
Gallon jugs are more flexible in this regard ... and will provide you with a <ahem>, gratuity ... an amount of excess wine that is left over from racking into similar sized vessels ... it is a consumable amount leftover for enjoyment. A slippery slope though ... the habit of leaving a "gratuity".

Alternately to the gallon jugs you could also just go with a full size carboy and use glass marbles for topping off.

As for corks, you might consider trying Zorks. They can be inserted by hand if desired.