How to Make Wine The Right Way
How to make wine made of fresh fruits right at the comforts of your own home is one of the most popular things among wine enthusiasts. And this does not only mean using grapes but other fresh fruits as well like mangoes, peaches, apples, and the likes. Doing so involves careful preparation and techniques. How to make wine is no longer “crush the fruit, add the water and leave to ferment” kind of thing. Others prefer boiling too thinking that it would kill the bad bacteria in the must. But whether you do either or both, you will just end up getting disappointed. There’s more to it on how to make wine than these two things. Only people of long ago cater to such procedure.
Many years ago, the very first wine came from a sort of an “accident”. It was actually the result of this yeast fermenting fruits crushed for a purpose other than how to make wine. If this yeast was allowed to ferment alone, it would have made good wine. Unfortunately, this yeast comes with what we call ‘undesirable’ yeast (wild yeast), and several kinds of bacteria which can ruin our wines. They bring about what we call ‘undesirable’ ferments that usually take place at the same time as the ferment we want to take place so that instead of a wine of quality, the result is one tasting of flat beer or cloudy evil-smelling liquid fit only for disposal. Once these things happen, there is really not much we can do that is why we should do everything we can to prevent these things from happening as we learn how to make wine. Many think that boiling the fruits might do the trick. But actually, with boiling comes another problem — the release of pectin. Did you know that all fruits contain pectin, this glutinous substance which causes jams to ’set’ ? Boiling fruit releases pectin. This pectin holds and gives wine a cloudiness that is impossible to clarify or even filter out. We may put the crushed fruit through a jelly-bag to remove every particle of pectin-bearing fruit and then boil the juice only, but this is a messy, tedious job that takes hours and eliminates all the pleasure from wine-making.
So what we really need is a method that will destroy the wild yeast and bacteria on the fruits (like boiling does) without actually boiling, and, also, without heating our fruits at all because even little heat can bring out the pectin. This method is what we call the ’sulphiting’ method. It very easily and quickly produces full-bodied, crystal-clear wines. All that is necessary to achieve this are tablets costing just pennies. These are the Campden fruitpreserving tablets that are available in bottles of twenty from most chemists or pharmacists. Ordinarily (and provided the fruit is not too heavily affected with wild yeast and bacteria), one tablet will destroy the undesirable element contained in one gallon of crushed fruit pulp, but we cannot be sure of this. Now, two tablets will surely do this, but being a comparatively heavy dose this might also destroy the yeast we shall be adding so that the ferment we desire does not take place. A sure fire method takes care of both these risks, not only destroying the wild yeast and bacteria on the fruits, but also allowing the yeast we add to ferment alone and unhindered to produce wines of clarity and quality the like of which cannot be produced by any other method. But before we add our yeasts we shall have increased the amount of liquid or pulp to nearly twice the amount, consequently reducing the amount of sterilizing solution to half or the equivalent of one Campden tablet per gallon. In this way we achieve our overall aim.
