Joy of Home Wine Making by Terry A. Garey Read Free Book Online

canned or bottled juices, go ahead, but I think the frozen ones are better. I don’t recommend canned orange or grapefruit juice at all, but if you insist on trying, use only twenty-four ounces or less. Sometimes you can find apricot nectar, or pear nectar, or even more rarely, canned cherry juice. Follow the basic apple juice recipe using anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight ounces of juice, and see what you get. You can never tell.
    INSTANT WINE KITS
    These are becoming available through gift catalogs that sell things other than winemaking supplies. You pour water into a mylar pouch, add yeast, and get grape wine a month or so later. They cost a lot, considering how much wine you get, and you don’t learn much by using them. They are also available for beer.
    For the same amount of money you could set up your basic home winemaking equipment, or buy a couple of bottles of really nice commercial wine.
    NON-INSTANT WINE KITS
    In Europe, many non-instant wine kits are available, especially for varietal grape wines. Some of them make excellent wines. They are now catching on here, too.
    A good wine supply store will sell you the kit, which usually includes the grape concentrate, the proper yeast, instructions, etc. for forty to sixty dollars. Many places also sell a kit that includes the basic equipment you need plus the ingredients for making wine for under one hundred dollars. They want you to succeed so you will come back!
    ONWARD
    You can continue to use this simple method for making wine, or you can go a step further and use real fruit and more sugar in a two-stage fermentation process. I’ll give you directions in the next chapter. It really isn’t that much more difficult, and it is a heck of a lot more rewarding. I still make simple juice wines upon occasion, strengthening the alcohol content by using more juice and more sugar. I also combine the two techniques quite often, asI will discuss later, in the section called The BIG TIME, where I will explain how to combine fruits, grains, vegetables, and methods.
    The lists of equipment, terms, and ingredients in the next section may seem a little intimidating, but look them over while you are making a few wines from this first section, and familiarize yourself with them before you go on to making whole fruit wines. You’ll quickly realize there isn’t anything truly complicated; it just takes some time to describe some simple techniques. You’ll be in the swing of it very quickly.
    Welcome to home winemaking!

CHAPTER THREE
    Equipment
    (The Whole Fruit and Nothing but the Fruit Except for Everything Else That Goes In)
    T his section brings you up to using whole fruits and vegetables in your recipes. It’s not that much more trouble, but you have to go through two stages of fermentation, and you need more equipment. I think you will like the results.
    When you made the fruit juice wines in the previous chapters, that first, frothy stage of fermentation was where the yeast did most of its work. The second, quieter stage took longer but was necessary for the yeast to consume the last bits of sugar and die off.
    When working with whole fruits and vegetables, we break the stages in two more completely, using the first, fast fermentation to extract sugars, flavors, and color from the fruits and vegetables. This is called fermenting on the fruit .
    In the second stage of fermentation, the used-up material is discarded in order to let the fermentation proceed without the danger of producing off flavors from any solids.

    The first stage is done in a large, sanitized food-grade plastic bin with a lid and a fermentation lock. It takes two weeks or less. The second stage happens in a glass container, again using a fermentation lock to guard against spoilage. It can take from two to six months for the fermentation to complete. After that, the racking and bottling procedures are no different from what you have already learned.
    Please be sure to read over the descriptions of