How to make Wine from Scratch

As you embark with the wine making procedure there might be a moment when you've got a batch of fruit that you think has the potential to to become a great batch of wine. If you don't have a recipe available you may be tempted to randomly throwing some things together and creating an original wine recipe. If you've been distilling some wine for a while, this isn't generally a problem as long as you are certain you include critical additions like sugar and yeast.

Your mission is to is to ensure that you accomplish balance within the wine. If you are using an ingredient that is extremely strong or contains a large volume of acid then you will need to ensure that you proportion it with some water for dilution purposes. Generally, if the fruit is powerful, the less of it you will need. If you had used the same amount of elderberries to make a batch of wine as you'd employ to make grape wine, you'll probably end up with a batch of wine that is pretty much intolerable.

In order to make up a standard 5 gallon batch of wine, however, you will have to add enough water to constitute 5 whole gallons. If you are using wine grapes, you normally don't have to add any water in the east to compensate up your complete five gallons. However, if you're employing something like ginger root, that contains a much stronger flavor, in that caste you'll need to use a decent amount of water since you'll typically be using much less of the actual ingredients.

Additionally you'll also have to figure out how much, [if any], sugar you will have to add to your maturing recipe. With enough produce, you might not really need to add any sugar in since the produce may have a sufficient amount by itself to supplement the process. If you are not certain whether the produce you are employing require and additional sugar included, use a hydrometer to test the juice. This is a mostly simplistic and effortless to employ tool that contains a scale known as the 'Potential Alcohol' scale. This scale measures the prospective amount of alcohol which might be created by the juice in terms of percentages from zero to twenty.

Basically, if you getting a reading of 4 on the hydrometer that's when you'll know you've got an adequate amount of sugar to create 4 percent alcohol content in your wine. This is not enough alcohol for most people, so you'd have to include a bit of sugar. If you wanted to raise that level to around 12 percent then you will need to begin introducing sugar gradually and examining at regular times until such time as you run your test and the hydrometer attains a value of 12. In most cases, one pound of sugar should heighten the alcohol level by approximately one percent. Do not try to create a wine that with an alcohol measure of more than 13 percent because higher alcohol content might interfere with the stability and it's taste.

As always good luck in your wine making.