Basic Generic wine recipe for Beginners!

[xzarfna]

Having started winemaking a while ago, i have settled on (for now) using a very basic recipe which makes nice if simple wines. i have given it to friends and family who have used it with different juices and they have all (apart from one - which i will explain later) been a great success!

Essentially, these are the basic ingredients you will need

(Supermarket)

2 Litres of any juice - From concentrate is fine - just make sure there are no added preservatives; and if possible, Pure with no added sugar.

1kg of Granulated sugar - Brewing sugar is obviously good here too, but not as widely available in shops and can be twice the price of Sucrose.

2 Tea Bags

Next from Homebrew Suppliers:

Champagne yeast
Pectolase
Yeast Nutrient
Citric acid (to taste)


Instructions:

OK, what you want to do is sterilize all equipment before you begin.

add the juice of your choice to a large pan and heat on the stove. Add the Sugar and stir until fully dissolved. Next add the tea bags and heat the mixture until it begins to boil. allow to boil for a couple of minutes then allow to cool off the heat.

Add the mixture to a 4.5l demijohn and fill with cold water to just above the point were the DJ begins to curve towards the neck. Cover the hole to prevent any flies entering.

Once the mixture has reached room temperature, add the Yeast (rehydrated if your variety requires it), 2 teaspoons of pectolase and 1-3 teaspoons of nutrient (Will address this soon)

Fit the DJ with an airlock and allow to ferment for 2-4 weeks.

After around 3 days of no airlock activity, fermentation is most likely complete. At this point you can rack the wine into another DJ along with a campden tablet to prevent spoilage.

Once the wine appears clear (This can take a long time so be patient) rack it once more, then once it is clear again, you can bottle and leave for around 3 months to mature!


Now - To address above issues

the amount of nutrient required depends on the type of juice you are using.

If you are using a pure juice then it should only require 1 teaspoon
a concentrate will require 2 as this generally has less nutrients than the pure stuff
and if you are using something that isn't a JUICE - such as elderflower, use 3, as it will not contain much if any nutrient at all!

 

[xzarfna]

now, a few recipes i have used/seen:

Grapefruit and Pineapple (1l of each)
Prune (1l prune, 1l red grape)
Cherry (500ml + 1500ml water boiled in pan) of cherry concentrate - 2tsp nutrient)
elderflower (500ml of elderflower cordial + 1500ml water) - 3tsp nutrient
Tropical (2l of cartons of Tropical Blend)
Banana ( 3kg of banana, washed, sliced with skins on, boiled in 2l of water for 15 mins then filtered through a muslin cloth into DJ)
Kiwi Fruit ( 42 kiwi fruits, peeled, blended and boiled with 2l of water then filtered through muslin cloth.)

As with recipe, 1kg of sugar is added to all recipes during boiling stage.

 

[xzarfna]

PS - if any more veteran winemakers would like to look at my recipe and maybe refine it or just explain it in better terms, maybe correct a few mistakes a may have made, it would probably be better for beginners to use

 

[DanielW]

What are the tea bags for? (Im assuming for the tanins) When are they used?

 

[BernardSmith]

Hi Xzarfna, and welcome...Your basic recipe will certainly result in wine but here are two or three thoughts to consider.
1. Beer needs heat but wine does not. Cooking fruit (or the juice ) can destroy some or much of the aromatics and flavor molecules. There is no good reason to heat any juice and if you add the sugar slowly and stir vigorously (say, in a blender) the sugar will be sufficiently dissolved for the yeast, over the days of active fermentation, to gain access to all the sugars in the must.
2. Most fruit juice will have a specific gravity of close to 1.050 - Adding 1 Kg of sugar (2.2 lbs) will send the sugar content into the stratosphere. You want to aim (for a wine) for a gravity of about 1.090 - and so that is about 0.5 Kg when added to 2 L of juice. Unless you want the wine to knock you out until the next day you really don't want to treat the wine as if it were distilled spirits. Adding that much sugar will also require you to age the wine a year or longer... In fact, you could treat the juice like cider - and simply aim for a low alcohol quaffable drink that could be bottled and opened about one month after you pitch the yeast could be drunk in the summer to compete with beer and cider (I am from the UK and there cider is always hard). In other words, you could drink a pint of these fruit wines at a sitting - (the ABV would be about 6 or 7%)...
3. Your choice of yeast is IMO a choice that many novice wine makers use... but Champagne yeast is a sledge hammer - It will strip off flavors and aromatics. I would use a gentler wine yeast. There are many 71B, D47, QA23, to name three.