White Wine Making Made Easy
The decision of whether to make white wine or red wine is largely a matter of choice. But it also depends on which type of wine-making grapes you have access to. For white wine making you will need suitable green grapes that have been produced for making wine. Alternatively you will need a white wine concentrate. Some people even use white grape juice for making white wine at home.
The other things that you will need to be able to make white wine successfully are water and wine yeast, and unless there is sufficient sugar content in the grapes, you will need additional sugar as well. Something many amateur wine makers don’t realize is that sugar is a vitally important element of both red and white wine, even if the wine you are making is going to be very dry in terms of taste. As the sugar and yeast react with one another and ferment to produce alcohol, the sweetness of the sugar dissipates.
While sugar, water and yeast (plus of course the green grapes) are the basic ingredients for white wine, you may also need to use a yeast nutrient and Campden tablets, depending on the wine making recipe you are using, and the length of time you are going to keep the wine before you drink it. Basically the shorter the maturation time of white wine, and the quicker you drink it, the less necessary it is for you to use Campden tablets. Yeast nutrient can be great aid because it is like a fertilizer, and helps to make the yeast act more efficiently and effectively – and more quickly.
Campden tablets are sulfur-based and you could consider them to be a kind of disinfectant because they kill any bacteria or germs that form as the wine matures. They are usually crushed and added to the new wine after it has fermented and when the wine is racked.
Racking is a process that not all home-wine makers bother about more than once, but it is a process that is repeated regularly when the pros make wine. What it entails is siphoning the developing wine into a clean container. This has the effect of leaving all the sediment (or lees) behind in the original or previous container. The effect it has it to clarify the wine and make it sparkling clear rather than cloudy. Sometimes people call the process “wine fining”. It also adds oxygen to the wine which, while the wine is maturing (particularly in an oak barrel), will help to develop the flavor of the wine.
Don’t forget that you will need to rack your homemade wine at least once.
In terms of equipment for making white wine at home, you will probably find that you have most of the basic stuff already, including a funnel, spoon for stirring, saucepan, a glass bottle for activating the yeast and so on. You may not have a suitable container for actually fermenting the wine, but you can use a large white or transparent plastic bucket with a lid very successfully. Don’t try and get fancy with oak barrels and the like. It isn’t worth the effort at this level of wine making.
Most of the people who make their own white wine at home do so to produce an inexpensive homemade vin ordinaire that they can drink every day. It is also extraordinarily satisfying to be able to produce a bottle of wine that you can share with your friends and family.
