Wine Making at Home - Sugar Inversion

If you want to learn how to make wine, one of the essential things you have to do is invert your sugar before you add it to your juice.

What is sugar inversion?

Before I get to that, let's start with what yeast has to do to begin fermenting your juice, or more accurately, the sugar in your juice.

Yeast has to first break up household table sugar into two parts: glucose and sucrose. Once the yeast has used some energy doing the breakdown, then and only then can it start actually consuming the sugar and turning it into alcohol.

Inverting your sugar means that you are going to give your yeast a "head start" by breaking down the sugar in advance. This is an important step in learning how to make wine.

How do you do this?

Use about a cup of water and dissolve as much sugar as you can in a saucepan on the stove. Turn on the heat and get the solution close to boiling and add sugar until you can't add any more - in other words, no more sugar will dissolve.

Now add the juice of 1 lemon. The acid in the lemon will "crack" the sugar molecules and break it down into sucrose and glucose, exactly what our yeast would have to do. Let your sugar mixture cook for about 15 minutes close to boiling (watch it carefully or it could boil over).

Now let it cool to room temperature and use this mixture to add sugar to your juice. You want to add enough to get the specific gravity up to about 1.1 before you put your yeast in.

If you want to learn how to make wine, first learn to invert your sugar. You will be surprised at the difference in flavor!

Inverting your sugar is just one of the "secret steps" in wine making at home. Get all of the secrets at How to Make Wine. FREE 24 page book on making your own wine and it's an instant download. Go to How to Make Wine and get started making your own wine today!

How to Make Wine

Just found this great site on winemaking and how to make wine.

It covers the dos and don'ts in winemaking, the biggest winemaking mistakes, and even gives you a winemaker's formula recipe video!

Check it out at HOW TO MAKE WINE

Making Homemade Wine

How to Make Wine - New Blog

Just discovered a great new blog on how to make wine. You can check it out at www.LetsMakeWine.info

Check out Home Winemaking

Hi,

There's a great new winemaking video posted here: Home Winemaking 

Why Your Homemade Wine Doesn't Taste Good

It's true - the first few times I made my own wine - it tasted... uhhh... Bad.

I drank it anyway.

I wasn't a wine lover or connessuer or anything like that. I had just read that it was pretty easy to do and you didn't need much equipment and it was cheap.

Well - all of that is true.

The problem is that I wanted it to taste good. Actually - I wanted it to taste great.

But - it didn't.

So I did a little research and found out 2 "secrets", if you will, that increased that quality of the flavor almost instantly.

The next batch I made, even my wife drank some and said it was "OK". Now I was getting somewhere.

A few more batches and a few more little tweaks and changes and guess what? She didn't know it was mine! She thought I bought it. Pretty cool huh?

Now - believe me - this didn't happen over a few weeks or months. It actually took 3 and a half years. BUT - I did it.

I knew how to take store bought ingredients and turn them into a wine that tasted as good as or better than what you buy at the store or the wine shop.

So - what are those 2 secrets and what are the few tweaks? I'll get to that in my next post so stay tuned. In the mean time - you can get my basic "How to make Your Own Wine" book free at this link: http://www.how-to-make-wine.net/free_book.html

How to Make Homemade Wine

Homemade wine making is fast becoming very popular across the world.

There are several reasons for this.The biggest one is that the cost to transport that yummy nectar from where they grow, harvest, and ferment it is going up right along with the cost of fuel. There's no two ways around it - we are about to see bottles of wine at the grocery store and wine shops double.

In the last year, there has been a flurry of "How To" guides crop up around the internet. All of the guides are helpful and at least can get a beginner started.

The truth is, you can make high quality wine, award winning wine, at home, in a 5 gallon food bucket.Some preparation and materials are required. You have to at least have a hydrometer.

You need at least the 5 gallon bucket. AND - you need some kind of near air tight secondary fermentation vessel. In the industry we call this a "carbouy".The secondary fermenter is where the wine will sit for weeks or months finishing it's fermentation. For this reason, the carboy must be sealed so that air cannot get to the wine.

However, there has to be a way for the CO2 to escape.So - an airlock is used.There are very inexpensive airlocks and more expensive airlocks. They all do the same thing - keep the air out.

Then to round out the equipment, there are various racking canes, bottling tubes, and plastic tubing.

Some chemicals may be required as well.Yeast is an obvious first one (not really a chemical but a dormant microbe). Citric acid, potassium sorbate, metabisulfate, campden tablets, pectin enzyme and a few others are pretty common.

The biggest secret in home wine making is: get the good stuff to start with. There is no reason to use frozen grape juice from the grocery store.There are actually vineyards that will sell small quantities of grapes or even crushed grapes and juices, fresh from the vineyard. Although these are hard to locate, they do exist.

I have found at least one wine making guide that lists these sources.Aside from the money savings (you can make wine for about 25 cents a bottle), there is the actual enjoyment of making something that you can drink!

If your batch comes out really good, you will be calling all your neighbors and friends to come and give it a try.Cheers and happy wine making!

By: Mike Carraway
Mike Carraway has been making homemade wine for the last 20 years. Get a FREE COPY of his latest book, "How to Make Wine" at www.how-to-make-wine.net/free_book.html and you can be making wine tonight!