Mostly Harmless: A Short Guide to Making Wine

Winemaking can fill a library, and has. This is the short version: what happens, what you need, and the handful of steps that turn fruit into wine. Enough to make your first bottle and decide whether you want the library.

• DifficultyModerate. Easy steps, lots of patience
• Hands-on timeAn hour or two, spread over a few months
• Ready in2–6 months, longer for big reds
• Makes4.5 litres in a demijohn, or scale up

In Vino, Mostly Patience #

Wine is fruit juice that yeast has turned into alcohol, then left alone long enough to become interesting. Grapes are the famous fruit, but almost anything sweet will do. Plum, mulberry, mango and passionfruit wines are all made by the same steps, and are known as country wines, mostly because they were made by people in the country with too much fruit.

If you have made cider or mead, you already know most of this. Wine adds three things: a little chemistry, more racking, and a lot more waiting.

What Wine Needs #

Every wine, whatever the fruit, comes down to the same handful of ingredients. Grapes contain nearly all of them naturally. Other fruit usually needs a hand.

What	Why it matters	Examples
Sugar	Becomes the alcohol. Grapes have plenty; most other fruit needs extra	Dextrose (H&S) 1kg, or plain white sugar
Acid	Gives wine its freshness. Too little tastes flat and flabby	Tartaric Acid, Citric Acid
Tannin	The dry grip in a red wine. Adds structure to fruit wines	Vintner's Harvest Tannin
Yeast nutrient	Fruit other than grapes is often short on yeast food	Brewmaster Wine Nutrient, Mangrove Jacks Wine Yeast Nutrient
Pectinase	Breaks down the pectin in fruit so the wine clears	Vintner's Harvest Pectinase, Brewmaster Pectinase
Campden tablets	Sulphite that protects the fruit from wild yeast and bacteria, and the finished wine from oxygen	HS Campden Tablets, Brew Master Campden Tablets
Wine yeast	Does the actual work. See the table below	Our wine yeast range

The equipment #

Item	Why
A 15–30L fermenter	For the first week with the fruit in. A wide opening makes stirring and straining easy
A demijohn the same size as your batch, with a bored bung and an S-Bend Airlock	Where the wine finishes fermenting and ages once the fruit is out. A 5L demijohn suits a 4.5 litre batch
A second demijohn, with a bung and airlock	Wine is racked more than once, so you need a clean vessel to move it into each time
An Easy Syphon	Moves the wine between vessels gently, leaving the sediment behind
Hydrometer and a trial jar	Tells you how strong it will be, and when it has finished
Plastic Wine Thief	Takes a sample out of the demijohn without tipping or disturbing it
A no-rinse sanitiser (we stock several)	Wine sits around for months, so everything must start clean
A funnel	For getting wine into a narrow demijohn neck without decorating the bench

You do not need everything on day one. The second demijohn and the syphon are not needed until the first racking, about a week in.

The Steps #

This is the shape of every wine. A good recipe gives you the amounts for your fruit.

1. Prepare the must. "Must" is the winemaker's word for the juice before it becomes wine. Crush or chop the fruit into a sanitised fermenter, or start from juice.
2. Add a Campden tablet (one per 4.5 litres is typical) and the pectinase, cover, and wait 24 hours. This quietens any wild yeast before yours arrives.
3. Adjust the must. Add sugar, acid, tannin and nutrient as your recipe says. Take a gravity reading: around 1.085–1.095 gives a wine of about 11–13%.
4. Add the yeast and keep it at the temperature on the packet. Stir the fruit down once or twice a day.
5. After 5–7 days, strain and rack. Strain off the fruit, then siphon the wine into a sanitised demijohn with a bung and airlock.
6. Let it finish. Over the next few weeks it will slow, stop and begin to clear. Two identical gravity readings a week apart means it has finished.
7. Rack again into a clean demijohn, off the sediment, and add another Campden tablet to protect it.
8. Age it. Leave it somewhere cool and dark for a few months, racking off any new sediment. Whites and fruit wines are often ready in 2–3 months. Big reds want six months or more.
9. Bottle it once it is clear and the gravity has not moved for several weeks.

Racking is simply siphoning the wine off its sediment into a clean vessel. It is how wine gets clear without filters or fuss. Keep the end of the siphon above the sediment, and fill the new demijohn close to the top so there is little air touching the wine.

Pick Your Yeast #

Yeast	Best for
Mangrove Jacks CY17	Sweet white and dessert wines
Mangrove Jacks BV7	Full-bodied, aromatic white wines
Mangrove Jacks AW4	Aromatic whites in the German style, such as Riesling
Mangrove Jacks CL23	Dry whites and sparkling wines
Mangrove Jacks MA33	White fruit wines. It also softens sharp, acidic fruit
Mangrove Jacks CR51	Light, fruity reds for drinking young, such as Pinot Noir
Mangrove Jacks R56	Rich, full-bodied reds such as Merlot and Malbec, and fruit wines
Mangrove Jacks VR21	Red fruit country wines
Mangrove Jacks SN9	An all-rounder. A safe choice for any fruit
Brewmaster Red Wine Yeast, Brewmaster White Wine Yeast	Easy, reliable choices for reds and whites
Lalvin EC-1118	Sparkling wines, and restarting a wine that has stopped too early

Finishing Touches #

Taking a sample #

Do not tip the demijohn to pour a sample: it stirs up the sediment and lets air in. Sanitise a Plastic Wine Thief and a trial jar, take the airlock out, dip the thief into the middle of the wine well above the sediment, and refit the airlock straight away. Taste the sample rather than pouring it back. Once a week is plenty; every sample costs a little wine and lets in a little air. For more, see our Safe Sampling Guide.

Your hydrometer readings and our ABV calculator tell you how strong it is. A Vinometer gives a rough check on a finished dry wine.

Stabilising and back-sweetening #

Wine usually ferments dry. Back-sweetening means adding sweetness after fermentation has finished, but the yeast is only resting and will happily eat any sugar you add. Stabilising stops it, using two products together:

Product	What it does
Campden Tablets	Release a little sulphite, which stuns the yeast and protects the wine from oxygen and spoilage. Usually 1 tablet per 4.5 litres, crushed. Check the packet
Potassium Sorbate	Stops the yeast from multiplying. It cannot stop a ferment that is still going, so the wine must be finished first. Use the rate on the packet

Add both to the finished, racked wine, wait 24–48 hours, then sweeten to taste. Wine Expert Wine Conditioner is a ready-made sweetener for exactly this. Leave it a week or two before bottling to make sure nothing restarts.

Bottling #

Fill your bottles with the Easy Syphon, keeping the end of the tube above any sediment. Traditional wine corks need a tool called a corker to squeeze them in, which we do not stock. The easy alternatives push in by hand: plastic top corks, or the corks that come with our glass wine bottles. Both are fine for wine you will drink within a few months. Ask us which ones suit your bottles. Heat shrink capsules over the top make it look the part.

Never bottle a wine that is still fermenting, or a sweetened wine that has not been stabilised. Glass wine bottles are not built to hold pressure, and the cork will lose that argument.

Write everything down: the fruit, the amounts, the readings and the dates. In six months, when it is wonderful, you will want to know exactly how you did it.

Happy brewing, and may every bottle be better than the last.