Homemade Wine

Tip Hero serves up fresh money-saving tips daily,
with over 2,000 tips shared to date.

GET FREE UPDATES:

Tips by Category:

Food & Dining Out

Home > Food & Dining Out > Topics: Beer & Wine

-----------------------------------------

Homemade Wine

Submitted by: anonymous 04/30/2009 7:22 PM

Homemade wine costs about 50 cents per bottle to make, aside from the initial investment in buying kit equipment and bottles.

We bought our bottles for almost nothing at the local redemption center and use them from year to year. If your fruit is free, the per-bottle cost includes a cork, sugar and yeast. Most of the 50 cents is to buy the cork.

The process is simple, and not time-consuming, though you will want to do some Internet research or borrow a library book.

We've successfully made wine from the Concord grapes that grew wild on our property. This wine in particular impressed relatives who were knowledgeable wine drinkers. We've also made wine from our cultivated grapes. I've had homemade blueberry wine that was good.

We currently make our best wine from our blackberries. Often we've used the blackberries from the freezer that didn't get eaten during the course of the year. Right now I have about 40 bottles of blackberry wine in my basement made over the last few years... some better than others.

We have been guilty of making bad wine as well. Sometimes it's too sweet, has very low alcohol content or blows off the cork in the basement. We were not happy with experiments with rhubarb, pear and strawberry wines. We're novices, so don't know why some things work, and some doesn't. But even with less successful batches, we're out only a few dollars.

For fifty cents per bottle it doesn't need to be amazing wine. It just needs to be good enough.

---
sponsored: Find Money Budgeting Tips.

---
Tip Hero serves up new money-saving tips daily.
Get free updates via Email , RSS or Twitter.

More Money-Saving Tips:

Boxed Wine Keeps Getting Better

BYO Wine to Restaurants??

Decent $5 Bottles of Wine

How to Save Money on Wine

Sponsored Searches:

Comments:

.................................

How many blackberries do you need to make 40 bottles of wine? How long do you let yours age?

Posted by anonymous on May 01, 2009 11:47 AM

.................................

Wine recipes vary. Very roughly it takes about three pounds of fruit to produce a batch of wine. Each batch produces about six bottles. So wine making is cheap only if you have a free or very cheap source of fruit.

We usually do two batches at a time. Freezing fruit allows us to start batches during the leisurely winter months... or might allow one to slowly accumulate enough fruit for a single batch.

Fermenting is a two-step process which takes a couple months. Once bottled, the wine needs to age at least six months. A year is better.

Posted by anonymous on May 02, 2009 11:04 AM

.................................

a friend of mine had a batch of blackberry wine go vinegar on him and he ended up selling it to the asian restraunt in town for 40$ i think. may not be legal, but food for thought

Posted by anonymous on May 03, 2009 11:32 AM

.................................

I've been making my own wine now for about 2 years. I don't even drink it that much; sometimes I use it in cooking to soften meat.

I don't use chemicals, and I haven't had a batch go bad yet.

I was making yogurt, then started making wine.

Wine is so easy to make, no cooking or mashing like beer. Distilling liquor yourself is illegal, but it's also too much work.

Most cheap wine, so far as I can tell, is made from green Thompson grapes. Thompson grapes are great for eating, but rather bland for wine. So they are probably flavored.

You can buy a gallon of purple Concord grape juice, Wal-Mart brand, for less than $5. You can just put yeast in it for a dry wine and let it set a while. Or, for higher alcohol, drink off a cup or too of grape juice and replace it white sugar and add the yeast. Works better if you dissolve the sugar in the grape juice in the microwave first.

Much better after a month than cheap Thompson grape wine!

One of the problems in the ancient world was a lack of effective stoppers. So a lot of the beer and wine went bad. There are fancy ways of doing this, with bottles and carboys, etc. In the modern world, it's easy to do on the cheap.

Take the lid off the plastic jug it came in. Loosely drop the bottle of wine-in-the-making in a plastic grocery bag and loosely tie the top. Then cover the top loosely with another bag and tie it at the bottom. Then you can put another bag on. Just keep the juice sealed to keep the gnats out and loosely tied where the air bubbles can come out.

When you get ready to drain it, get a plastic aquarium or other siphon hose cheap. Stick one end in the wine. Have another bottle read. Use a turkey baster to start the siphon process through the hose and drain it into the other bottle.

Bad wine smells, and it's not something you'll want to drink. Use it for cleaning, now, or later when it becomes vinegar. Both alcohol and vinegar kill germs.

I've got some wines that I need to try. Supposedly white wine should be drunk in a year, and red wines can continue to age. I just need to sample mine.

Tannin makes wine last longer. You can add some strong tea to white wines for tannin.

A lot of the new "green" cleaners have alcohol as a main ingredient. If I don't like any of my wine, I'll clean with it.

Posted by Betsy R. on May 03, 2009 10:30 PM

.................................

Another cheap way to secure the top of the bottle during fermentation is to secure a balloon over the top. Poke a few pinholes in it to allow some of the gases to escape. When the balloon completely deflates and is no longer bubbly, your wine is completed.

Posted by anonymous on May 04, 2009 6:42 PM

.................................

Could someone please post the step-by-step process for homemade wine. I would like to try this.
Cheryl

Posted by Cheryl on May 07, 2009 4:31 PM

.................................

What makes homemade wine turn to vinegar?

Posted by CSR on May 07, 2009 4:35 PM

.................................

For Cheryl,

You have to get a book on making wine... or read up on it online. I have three or four slim books, picked up at one yard sale. They vary in complexity of information, and some authors have differing opinions. One of my books says you must use at least some grape in all fruit wines, while other books differ.

Often I like to read several authors on a topic I'm trying to learn about, and that gives me a sense of the boundaries... what is essential, and what isn't.

I was amused at the following thrifty passage in one book: "A good ploy is to make mixed, anonymous wine from the spare, surplus fruit which you may find in the annual clear-out of the freezer..."

Posted by anonymous on May 15, 2009 9:02 PM

.................................

Little vinegar flies or gnats get into wine and take it to the next fermentation step, vinegar. It may be more complicated than that.

Google balloon wine or hillbilly wine for the Welch's grape juice stuff. Purple grape juice is great at first, because it has the best balance of acids, sugars, and tannins.

Jack Keller has a more complicated wine-making site, but I have not found chemicals necessary.

You can use baking yeast or buy wine yeast cheaply online. Wine yeast is even cheaper than baking yeast. I've used them both, and don't notice much difference.

You need to keep it covered, but be able to let the air out, with either a balloon or several loose plastic bags, etc. After about 18 hours, the yeast will be multiplying like mad. Even a loosely capped bottle will explode from the air bubbles. But you need to keep little flies out of it. Eventually, the fermentation slows down. Try and make yourself wait at least 30 days.

The yeast debris that settles at the bottom won't hurt you, but a lot of people don't want
to consume it. You can siphon the fluid above it off.

The main thing is to get going and do it.

Posted by Betsy R. on May 16, 2009 1:35 AM

.................................

Thank you for the tips, I do want to try to make some homemade wine. I will google balloon wine and hillybilly wine for sure, such interesting-sounding types of wine.
Cheryl

Posted by Cheryl on May 21, 2009 5:07 PM

.................................

-----------------------------------------

Share Your Comments:

Comments may need to be approved before they are displayed.

Comments:

Name (leave blank if you want to be anonymous):

Email Address (your email address will not be displayed):

Website URL (not required; please do not include "http://"):