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Home Winemaking
#1

Home Winemaking

So I've been interested in getting into home winemaking for the following reasons:

1) Like to know how things work, enjoy creating/building things and craftsmanship and self-sufficiency in general.

2) Enjoying/cooking with wine more frequently.

3) Little bit of additional bait/intrigue for having women over.

4) Personal finances and fuck you to government led social decay. I live in a jurisdiction that heavily taxes alcohol (among other things) then proceeds to waste tax dollars on all kinds of useless/negative things.

5) Bringing to dinner parties/house parties/hangouts to save cash, have a bit more swagger, and easy conversation starter (I plan to try making different varieties for fun/to learn more and the batch sizes seem far more that I will consume on my own since I only drink moderately).

I've found a number of kits in local stores/online, though also heard homemade wine can turn out really good or really bad.

My favorite red and white wines are Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, and I was thinking of starting with those for that reason. That said, what I'd really like to start with are wines which are easy to make well, and also versatile for both cooking and drinking.

Does anybody here have any experience/recommendations/pointers/datasheet on this?
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#2

Home Winemaking

You're probably better off learning to make beer/spirits at home, depending on your local laws.

As far as I'm aware there's more information readily available for brewing beer + distillation.

Wine is an entirely different beast. Are you going to grow your own grapes? Are you going to source them from a grower? Are you going to purchase them by the ton (as growers usually sell them)? Can you guarantee that the grower is giving you good quality fruit rather than shitty unripe fruit? Can you tell the difference?

Of course if you just want to cook up some alcoholic liquid maybe the above doesn't matter (and worst case you could distill the result into a brandy of unpredictable quality). But if you want to make a true quality wine, you'll need to take it seriously.

There is the phenomenon of the "virtual winery", a person or persons who form a group to:

a) buy grapes from growers
b) send them to a winemaking facility to make something to their specs
c) a storage/maturation facility (if you decide you want oak character in your wine)
d) bottling +/- labelling facility

Obviously this is on a whole other scale than your typical hobbyist - virtual wineries are typically crafting a wine for a specific market with specific tastes.

But if you can achieve this stage, you'll make a lot of money and have an easy conversation starter at dinner/house parties.

Best of luck! [Image: biggrin.gif]

Feel free to PM me for wine advice or other stuff
ROK Article: 5 Reasons To Have Wine On A Date
RVF Wine Thread
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#3

Home Winemaking

Wine making is very prevalent here in Croatia. Most of people in the villages have at least small vineyard. I am making wine myself for family, guests and whoever wants to try. Recently we started to have really sweet wine that could trick you into drinking more because we remove grape stems by hand and we filter out this "sour" thing (don't know english terms).
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#4

Home Winemaking

Quote: (07-30-2017 09:16 AM)Tengen Wrote:  

You're probably better off learning to make beer/spirits at home, depending on your local laws.

As far as I'm aware there's more information readily available for brewing beer + distillation.

Wine is an entirely different beast. Are you going to grow your own grapes? Are you going to source them from a grower? Are you going to purchase them by the ton (as growers usually sell them)? Can you guarantee that the grower is giving you good quality fruit rather than shitty unripe fruit? Can you tell the difference?

Ya beer is also on my list but I've heard it's much easier to do decently well, so I'm not as worried.

With my time budget/level of knowledge right now I was thinking of starting with kits from Winexpert http://www.winexpert.com/, though open to suggestions. Any thoughts?
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#5

Home Winemaking

Looking into this more, it seems like there are various "price tiers" (Eclipse, Limited Edition, Selection, World Vinyard, Vintners Reserve, Chai Maison for Winexpert) for the same varietals.

That said, for newbies, is it worth spending additional money for better juice, or is the process of making it so finicky that it would be better to learn on cheaper juice (hoping that the supplier needs to maintain a high enough "quality floor" for the product to be commercially successful)?
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#6

Home Winemaking

Here's an article on how to make your own wine on the cheap.

Follow the instructions and you'll have a batch of wine ready in two weeks or so.

Quote:Mr Money Mustache Wrote:

Frugal yet Fancy Homebrewing – with 30 Seconds of Work

discoSummer seems to have started a little early this year here in Colorado, and brought along all of its pleasant side effects. Abandoning the socks and shoes, gathering with local friends to play in the park and watch the sunsets, and of course an increased consumption of cold beverages.

Long ago, I wrote a post about brewing your own beer. It was an amazing experience and it produced great beer. Many readers are advanced brewers and they wrote in with advice and encouragement. It is still a great hobby for the many people who enjoy it. But unfortunately for my friends and me, we found that after a few batches the habit just didn’t stick.

It was all in the practicalities: the brewing process takes a couple of hours and involves quite a bit of repetitive labor that can be guilt-inducing for those of us who like to use all our time productively. Bottling is a particularly slow chore, and the more efficient alternative of keg storage encourages excessive beer consumption because you end up with your own refrigerated beer tap taunting you at all hours. To top it all off, the home-brewed beer was only slightly cheaper than the local microbrews, which can be found for just over a dollar a bottle around here if you pick them up during a sale.

To create a winning home brewing situation for lazy people like myself, I needed an impossible combination of attributes: a low time commitment, small batches, low cost, no major research, and no bottling. I didn’t think such a thing existed, but a local friend of mine who is known on this blog as The Honey Badger has proved me wrong. He has rediscovered an age-old method to convert good fruit juice into very good summer party beverages with about 30 seconds of work (plus of course two weeks of fermentation).

The end result is a sparkling beverage that is extremely tasty, much drier (less sweet) than the original fruit, and contains about 6% alcohol – the perfect level for adult relaxation and a factor in the easy breezy style of this very article which is being written with a large mug of cider right next to the laptop.

At less than 60 cents per 12 ounce serving, this is a truly frugal way to get the party started. Replacing a portion of your microbrew consumption with some innovative drinks you ferment yourself could save you hundreds per year. And pulling out a fresh gallon jug of this fine hard cider from the fridge is a prestigious way to impress your party guests. As long as you don’t use it as an excuse to consume more, something we laid down the rules for in the old Beer ‘o’ Clock article.

So let’s make some right now.

1: Procure the largest, fanciest bottle of juice you can find

yeastI chose this lovely one-gallon jug bottle of North Coast Sonoma County unfiltered apple juice from the new hipster market in town called Lucky’s. It runs about $5.99 for a bottle this size. The key is to look for something without preservatives, and with a very good natural taste. You can ferment pretty much anything with sugar in it, but we are fancy people here, so we use fancy juice. Apple, grape, mango, pineapple, pear, and berry juices work beautifully.

2: Take off the cap and dump in 1/2 teaspoon of Champagne Yeast
You might give it a little swirl or shake to disperse the yeast nicely through the juice. Save the cap, for you’ll be putting it back on once the brewing is done.

3: Put a cork with an airlock* in it.
stopperThen put an ounce of clean water (or a sterile liquid like whiskey as shown here) into the airlock. I recommend setting the bottle in the center of your kitchen table at this point so you can watch the show. Within 24 hours, it will start gently bubbling and fizzing, as the yeast works its incredible alchemy of turning the useless sugar molecules into useful alcohol ones. This bubbling will go on for about two weeks. At that point, you may notice that it slows down as the yeast runs low on sugar.

And you’re done! After those two weeks, put the cap back on, and put the jug in your fridge. A small amount of additional fermentation will happen, which will release more carbon dioxide that gets forced back into solution to make the mixture slightly bubbly. It will store well for many weeks in the fridge, or you can use it immediately. Dispense freely to self and friends, and watch the pleasant results.

Update: In response to the idea of in-bottle carbonation, some readers brought up the concern that it is possible to break certain bottles if the pressure grows too large. The thing is, you don’t know what “too large” is. Therefore, I will start a new dangerous experiment today that may cost me a whole bottle of cider: I’ll brew a new batch, cap the bottle tightly after two weeks, and leave it in a a protected enclosure in my warm garage for several additional days. Then see if it explodes, gets extremely fizzy, or just ends up perfectly carbonated. Plastic bottles will also eliminate the risk of dangerous explosions, because they have a great capacity to stretch. Update 2: I tried it and the bottle did not explode. But others report that explosions do occasionally happen (especially with larger/thinner glass bottles), so make sure you do it in a safe place if you try this.

juiced

The key to this whole deal is that we have eliminated the time-consuming parts of beer and wine brewing. Instead of boiling grains for hours and adding multiple ingredients, we use just one ingredient. Instead of washing carboys and siphoning from one to another, we ferment in just the bottle supplied with the juice. And instead of sterilizing and capping dozens of bottles afterwards, we just throw that same bottle in the fridge and serve directly from it. The result is obviously not beer, but the variety of fruits and other sweet things that Nature makes available will still keep your taste buds entertained.

I just started this experiment two weeks ago. We cracked the first bottle last night, and it was such a success that I decided to share the results with you as well as start a few more bottles for future use.

Bottoms up!

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/04/2...own-cider/

“I have a very simple rule when it comes to management: hire the best people from your competitors, pay them more than they were earning, and give them bonuses and incentives based on their performance. That’s how you build a first-class operation.”
― Donald J. Trump

If you want some PDF's on bodyweight exercise with little to no equipment, send me a PM and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.
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#7

Home Winemaking

I do this as a hobby. If you like hard cider I'd recommend starting with that first, as it's easier.

If you make wine from fresh grapes or frozen must (not juice) then you need a wine press and depending on the quantity, a way to crush and de-stem the grapes.

If only you knew how bad things really are.
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#8

Home Winemaking

Actually you can order all the equipment, yeast and supply online at Amazon.

Just order the grape syrup/concentrate, that's what is left when you press all the grapes, just like the vineyard.

Benefits of making your own wine:

You will feel like a man, because you made something. You will learn about the science of making wine, the culture of making wine. The history connected to man and wine= viniculture.

The negative of making your own wine: Grape stains are dangerous so be careful when making it, after making your own wine, your patience will be tested, because you cannot drink it until at least 30 days (fermentation), thus you should ideally wait 6 months before drinking it.

This is what I use as my concentrate:

https://www.amazon.com/Winexpert-Red-Gra...GJZYSMQN9B

This is the wine kit I use to make in my Kitchen or backyard, since grape stain is very dangerous.

https://www.amazon.com/Deluxe-Wine-Makin...3TSQBH7TXH

If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
– Bruce Lee

One must give value, but one must profit from it too, life is about balance
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#9

Home Winemaking

Quote: (07-30-2017 03:46 PM)Hannibal Wrote:  

Here's an article on how to make your own wine on the cheap.

Follow the instructions and you'll have a batch of wine ready in two weeks or so.

Quote:Mr Money Mustache Wrote:

Frugal yet Fancy Homebrewing – with 30 Seconds of Work

discoSummer seems to have started a little early this year here in Colorado, and brought along all of its pleasant side effects. Abandoning the socks and shoes, gathering with local friends to play in the park and watch the sunsets, and of course an increased consumption of cold beverages.

Long ago, I wrote a post about brewing your own beer. It was an amazing experience and it produced great beer. Many readers are advanced brewers and they wrote in with advice and encouragement. It is still a great hobby for the many people who enjoy it. But unfortunately for my friends and me, we found that after a few batches the habit just didn’t stick.

It was all in the practicalities: the brewing process takes a couple of hours and involves quite a bit of repetitive labor that can be guilt-inducing for those of us who like to use all our time productively. Bottling is a particularly slow chore, and the more efficient alternative of keg storage encourages excessive beer consumption because you end up with your own refrigerated beer tap taunting you at all hours. To top it all off, the home-brewed beer was only slightly cheaper than the local microbrews, which can be found for just over a dollar a bottle around here if you pick them up during a sale.

To create a winning home brewing situation for lazy people like myself, I needed an impossible combination of attributes: a low time commitment, small batches, low cost, no major research, and no bottling. I didn’t think such a thing existed, but a local friend of mine who is known on this blog as The Honey Badger has proved me wrong. He has rediscovered an age-old method to convert good fruit juice into very good summer party beverages with about 30 seconds of work (plus of course two weeks of fermentation).

The end result is a sparkling beverage that is extremely tasty, much drier (less sweet) than the original fruit, and contains about 6% alcohol – the perfect level for adult relaxation and a factor in the easy breezy style of this very article which is being written with a large mug of cider right next to the laptop.

At less than 60 cents per 12 ounce serving, this is a truly frugal way to get the party started. Replacing a portion of your microbrew consumption with some innovative drinks you ferment yourself could save you hundreds per year. And pulling out a fresh gallon jug of this fine hard cider from the fridge is a prestigious way to impress your party guests. As long as you don’t use it as an excuse to consume more, something we laid down the rules for in the old Beer ‘o’ Clock article.

So let’s make some right now.

1: Procure the largest, fanciest bottle of juice you can find

yeastI chose this lovely one-gallon jug bottle of North Coast Sonoma County unfiltered apple juice from the new hipster market in town called Lucky’s. It runs about $5.99 for a bottle this size. The key is to look for something without preservatives, and with a very good natural taste. You can ferment pretty much anything with sugar in it, but we are fancy people here, so we use fancy juice. Apple, grape, mango, pineapple, pear, and berry juices work beautifully.

2: Take off the cap and dump in 1/2 teaspoon of Champagne Yeast
You might give it a little swirl or shake to disperse the yeast nicely through the juice. Save the cap, for you’ll be putting it back on once the brewing is done.

3: Put a cork with an airlock* in it.
stopperThen put an ounce of clean water (or a sterile liquid like whiskey as shown here) into the airlock. I recommend setting the bottle in the center of your kitchen table at this point so you can watch the show. Within 24 hours, it will start gently bubbling and fizzing, as the yeast works its incredible alchemy of turning the useless sugar molecules into useful alcohol ones. This bubbling will go on for about two weeks. At that point, you may notice that it slows down as the yeast runs low on sugar.

And you’re done! After those two weeks, put the cap back on, and put the jug in your fridge. A small amount of additional fermentation will happen, which will release more carbon dioxide that gets forced back into solution to make the mixture slightly bubbly. It will store well for many weeks in the fridge, or you can use it immediately. Dispense freely to self and friends, and watch the pleasant results.

Update: In response to the idea of in-bottle carbonation, some readers brought up the concern that it is possible to break certain bottles if the pressure grows too large. The thing is, you don’t know what “too large” is. Therefore, I will start a new dangerous experiment today that may cost me a whole bottle of cider: I’ll brew a new batch, cap the bottle tightly after two weeks, and leave it in a a protected enclosure in my warm garage for several additional days. Then see if it explodes, gets extremely fizzy, or just ends up perfectly carbonated. Plastic bottles will also eliminate the risk of dangerous explosions, because they have a great capacity to stretch. Update 2: I tried it and the bottle did not explode. But others report that explosions do occasionally happen (especially with larger/thinner glass bottles), so make sure you do it in a safe place if you try this.

juiced

The key to this whole deal is that we have eliminated the time-consuming parts of beer and wine brewing. Instead of boiling grains for hours and adding multiple ingredients, we use just one ingredient. Instead of washing carboys and siphoning from one to another, we ferment in just the bottle supplied with the juice. And instead of sterilizing and capping dozens of bottles afterwards, we just throw that same bottle in the fridge and serve directly from it. The result is obviously not beer, but the variety of fruits and other sweet things that Nature makes available will still keep your taste buds entertained.

I just started this experiment two weeks ago. We cracked the first bottle last night, and it was such a success that I decided to share the results with you as well as start a few more bottles for future use.

Bottoms up!

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/04/2...own-cider/

One of the funniest things I heard, was a broke college student friend of a friend who did exactly this, except he'd use $1.29 neon green fruit drink with ~5% actual juice! Probably tasted one step above prison wine!

There's a local store around my area that sells the same brand of concentrate and kits with all the equipment. I've heard good things about them but wanted to avoid the risk of them upselling me on stuff that wouldn't make a difference at this point in time.
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#10

Home Winemaking

It sounds like he is making something like Apfelwein, which is very refreshing in the summer. I've made a batch or two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apfelwein
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#11

Home Winemaking

I'm reading The Art of Fermentation right now. The first actual "recipe" chapter is on mead, which is simply honey wine.

I didn't know what mead was but I figured this was an easy way to make cheap alcohol and tap into my viking roots.

It's easy as shit too:

1. Add raw honey to dechlorinated water
2. Stir
3. Wait

My first batch has been going for about 18 days now. It took almost a week for the ferment to start. I thought something was broken for the first week because it was just honey and water. I felt like a dumbass mixing this shit up, but once it started bubbling? Muahahaha

Now it tastes like honey wine. I'm going to let it go a few more weeks to get more alcohol out of it.

Wine is next.
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#12

Home Winemaking

My family have a vineyard in Rome. We produce roughly around 2,500 bottles per year. We also have a website where you can order from.

For Roosh forum members, I'm giving %50 special discount. Will deliver all over Europe. [Image: icon_mrgreen.gif]
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#13

Home Winemaking

Quote: (07-30-2017 07:45 PM)tarquin Wrote:  

It sounds like he is making something like Apfelwein, which is very refreshing in the summer. I've made a batch or two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apfelwein

I think I'll add that to my list too. I've enjoyed apple cider since I was a kid, and remember that often times the little bit at the end of the jug which started to ferment/get spicy in the fridge was quite good. Wouldn't be surprised if it turns out better than a bunch of commercial hard ciders (which sadly I've found something off about most of, as if they're just simply an artifically appley flavoured alcohol drink) if I do it deliberately.
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