Making wine with grapes rather than pre-pressed juice is definitely my preferred method. The total cost is twice that of using juice and 5 times as much work, but it gives you additional control and a higher quality product in the end. The concentrate kits that can be bought these days have come far compared to the terrible cans that preceded them. If time’s a factor, then I recommend using Winexpert kits. These kits create a higher quality wine and are available throughout the year. This is great because you don’t need to make fifty gallons in one go or all the same kind. You have the freedom to make wine when you like and you are not limited by the seasons.
Don’t forgot the most important rule of brewing at home – Sanitation, Sanitation and Sanitation!
For making wine use Sodium metabisulphite, Use 1 tablespoon for each gallon of water used and soak for about 10 minutes. And then drain it. Rinsing isn’t necessary. If some solution remains, do not worry, it’s the same stuff that will be added later.
If you’re using buckets of juice to make wine, this is what I recommend:
Day 1:
Pour your juice into a sanitized, larger, food grade standard container that leaves about 10 to 15% head space and add in one packet of yeast. Don’t fill the fermenter to the very top! The initial ten days of fermentations is going to be foamy and vigorous. Leave lots of room between the airlock and the must. Oxidizing and splashing the juice in the beginning is only good at this point. It helps create a full fermentation and helps reduce the quantity of sulfites within the juice. Numerous batches that I have personally tested actually have much greater levels of sulfite than is recommended (100 ppm), this ensures a stable product for shipping. This could cause problems at a later point by destroying too much yeast or/and preventing malolactic fermentation, something that matures and softens wine
Yeast: Adding cultured yeast into juice or grapes helps produce more consistent wines year to year. On occasion the additional sulphites kill off too much of the yeast and there isn’t enough cells to complete the process to dryness. There’s 100′s of yeast strains on grape skins. Adding a high quality yeast culture will eat the majority of sugars and prevents less wanted yeasts from adding and eating off flavors.
For white wines, peptic enzymes should be added. However, this isn’t always needed, it’ll ensure that your wine comes out clear. It is better to include it and to not have a need for it, than to not use it and create a hazy wine.
1st Racking: 
After the first ten days, rack (which means to siphon from one vessel to another) into a demi-jon or glass carboy and leave 1 to 3″ of headspace. You can add oak chips at this point if you like. My preference is after the 2nd racking.
Racking: Whenever racking, ensure that you transfer from the bottom of the 1st container into the bottom of the recipient container to avoid oxidation. Racking early is recommended highly. It will help create full fermentation and to produce a wine with a clear appearance. If you agitate the yeast you will add just a little oxygen into the must and this makes it easier for the yeast to ferment all of the sugar. Should you end up with some sediment (called lees), so not worry, you will some next time.
Timing: The time that you wait for this first racking is not critical. You will want to do it early though, while the yeast is healthy and young. The 1st racking “triggers” the yeast and adds in some oxygen that helps produce a fermentation that is more complete.
2nd Racking:
After 4 to 6 weeks you will need to rack again, but top off headspace using wine this time.
Dead Yeast: This particular step helps to avoid autolysis (decaying yeast). As with all dead things, yeast rots if it is left by itself for an extended period, and dying yeast will create an off-tasting wine.
Add Oak: For those that have not yet added oak, or those who would like more woody tannins, you should add the chips at this point. It will help fill up the fermenter and helps give the wine an oaken-barrel like finish, without going through the hassle of actually using a barrel.
Oak chips come in a variety of flavors to improve the flavor of your wines. {Light, medium or dark toasted American, French or Hungarian wood.|Each has its own distinctive flavor.}
Aging:
After 4 to 6 months do another rack and add in 1/4 of a teaspoon of potassium based meta-bisulphate to every 5 gallons. Perform this step sooner should you see a considerable amount of lees.
Sulphite: It is an important step to add sulphite into your wine to prevent oxidation and browning. It is a good idea to use a sulphite test kit and maintain levels of 80 to 100 ppm to avoid infections and spoilage. In spite of it’s wrongly deserved reputation, sulphites are definitely a good thing to add to wine.
Sulphites don’t cause headaches for 98% of the population. The main cause of wine triggered headaches are a result of an allergic reaction to the tannin antioxidants found in grape skins, or by fast and hot fermentation that creates fusel alcohols. Improper handling and storage of completed wines is another major suspect for causing headaches.
Bulk aging is best for wine rather than bottle aging. Rapid temperature changes and vibrations are damaging to wines. Should the temperature of your wine room change by 10 degrees between morning and night, your bottle will change by 10 
degrees too. Greater volumes such as demijons and carboys only change about 2 – 3 degrees. You have to figure if the advantage of bulk aging out ways the need to free the fermenter for your next batch.
Bottling:
Following a year of fermentation, the wine should be ready for bottling. Sanitize your corks and bottles for twenty minutes will be fine. It is not recommended to boil cork bottles and corks. Don’t forget the rule – bottle one, bottle the lot! You cannot leave half your wine, now open to air, for very long. After bottling, allow your bottles to sit up for a couple of days so that any pressure, created while forcing the cork in, is allowed to stabilize by pushing out the air as opposed to pushing a little bit of wine out.
I’ve shifted my beauty routine a great deal this year. I used to be all about buying the cheapest products I could find and hoping for the best. Unfortunately that started to take a toll on my body, especially my hair and skin. My “turning point” this year was when I bought my first all-natural hair care product, a hair regrowth and repair oil called Mira hair oil. Since then, I’ve been doing everything I can to turn my hair and skin routine into a chemical-free routine.
Photo courtesy www.heatheronhertravels.com
The Health Benefits of Wine
I was pleasantly surprised this week when I read an article about how one of my favorite past times, enjoying a nice glass of wine after a long day’s work, is actually making a positive contribution to my all-natural health and beauty routine! According to Professor Joseph Vercauteren of Montpellier University of Pharmacy in France, the most powerful antioxidants in the world are grape seed polyphenols, which are contained in wine. Two other elements of wine, the grapevine stalk (also known as resveratrol) and the grapevine sap (also known as viniferine) also have beauty-enhancing effects. They all help firm the skin, increase the skin’s radiance, and reduce wrinkles.
Enjoy Your Indulgence
So, the next time you crack open a bottle of your favorite wine, remember that you’re doing your skin a favor. As for whether or not it really works, maybe it’s just the rosy cheeks I get after I drink a glass of wine, but I really do feel like this small indulgence makes my skin glow!
When making wine at home you may find it more effective to use a juicer to crush and pulp your fruits rather than simply chopping, prior to adding the water. You have to be aware though that there are many “juicers” that won’t perform the job that a wine maker is hoping to perform. Sure, if you want to make a glass of fresh home made juice, they work perfectly. But if you’re looking for a device that will simply crush and pulp your fruit then the best juicer for winemaking is going to be a masticating juicer.
There are two different styles of these machines. The newest models are vertical masticating juicers, such as the Omega VRT350HD. The older style machines are horizontal masticating juicers, e.g. the Omega J8006. The good news for wine enthusiasts is that it’s the cheaper horizontal machines which will do a better job for you.
This is because the vertical units work as effective juice extractors. However, this isn’t what we want. Instead, the horizontal machines have a special homogenizing function which doesn’t extract the juice and separate it from the pulp but instead just crushes and grinds the pulp and juice together. As far as wine making goes, this is exactly what we want.
So if you’re wanting to make a tasty black raspberry wine. You could definitely just crush the berries in a nylon straining bag. That’s going to be the cheapest option. You may find you get better results if you run the berries through a horizontal masticating juicer using the “blank plate” which ensures no separation of pulp and juice. The fruits and juice is puréed. You can then put this into a nylon bag and you find that you get better results in terms of being able to set the color and extract the maximum amount of flavorful juice.
Instead of using a nylon bag, you could simply put all the pulped and crushed fruit (and juice) into the primary.
Taking the time to extract the full flavor and aroma of your chosen fruits is a worthwhile step if you hope to create the best wine possible, the right kind of juicer can definitely be of use. This is of course only the first step. You may feel that it’s overkill to spend over $200 on a juicer, but maybe not.
Since 2,200 BC the word has been getting out about the health benefits of wine. But it’s only in recent years that scientists have been able to determine the chemicals that are doing all the good work. No longer considered an old wives tale, or something the alternative health community is fixated on, the health benefits of wine have gone mainstream.
The substance that is given most of the credit is resveratrol, found in high concentrations in the skin and seeds of grapes – particularly those used for red wine. Studies indicate that resveratrol has anti-fungal, anti-oxidant, anti-coagulant, anti-bacterial. anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial and anti-cancer effects. Wow! That’s a lot of health boosting power.
But remember these benefits only come to moderate drinkers (typically defined as one glass for women daily and two glasses for men). Heavy drinking can have a negative impact on our health. And of course you’ll only get the health benefits if you couple your red wine with a healthy diet and exercise.
Here’s a toast to your good health!
In what may lead to a key advance for treating prostate cancer, researchers now know exactly why polyphenol antioxidants in green tea and red wine inhibit the growth of cancers. Explained in these new findings, publicized in the FASEB Journal online, is how the antioxidants in green tea and red wine produce a dual effect to interfere with a signaling cell pathway that is necassery for the growth of prostate cancer. This discovery is important since it might lead to development of medications that could halt or slow down cancer progression, or enhance present treatments.
“Not just does the SphK1/S1P pathway signaling play a part in prostate cancer, but it plays a part in other cancers too, like colon cancer, gastric cancers and breast cancer,”
stated Gerald Weismann, MD, chief editor of the FASEB online journal. “Even if research in the future shows that the benefits of green tea and red wine drinking is not as beneficial for humans as we have hoped, knowing which compounds in these beverages that interfere with this pathway is an all important step forward for developing medications that strike the exact same target.”
Researchers undertook in vitro experiments which demonstrated that inhibiting the sphingosine 1-phosphate/sphingosine kinase-1 (S1P/SphK1) pathway is essential for red wine and green tea polyphenol antioxidants to kill cancerous prostate cells. Following that, mice genetically modified to develop human prostate cancer tumors were either not treated or treated with wine and green tea polyphenol antioxidants. The mice treated displayed a reduction in tumor growth as a direct result of the inhibited S1P/SphK1 pathway. To mimic these preventative benefits of polyphenol antioxidants, another experiment was conducted. Three groups of mice were given drinking water containing a specific kind of green tea polpyphenol called EGCG, drinking water containing a different green tea polyphenol called polyphenon E, or just plain drinking water. The mice were implanted with human prostate cancer cells and the results demonstrated a dramatic reduction in tumor size in the mice given the water containing EGCG or polyphenon E.
“The profound effect that these antioxidants in green tea and red wine have within our bodies is a lot more that anybody could have dreamed of just twenty-five years ago.” Weismann added. “So long as they are used moderately, all the signs show that green tea and red wine may be ranked amongst the most powerful ‘health foods’ that we know about.”
The act and art of creating a delicious meal accompanied by our favorite glass of wine is something most of us take for granted. We choose the recipe from a cookbook or our favorite website, gather the ingredients at the grocery store, and come home for an evening of preparation. We sip a glass of wine as we prepare our food and bring our creation to the table when it’s complete.
During the process of making and enjoying our food and wine, it’s unlikely that we think about the fine motor skills that are required in each of those steps.
I recently read an article from an occupational therapy schools graduate, Estelle, who uses cooking as a therapeutic tool with her occupational therapy patients. There are so many different skills and types of movement that are involved in cooking: chopping, slicing, opening, removing, stirring. All of these little details can help train and retrain occupational therapy patients in all sorts of movements. Consider an automobile accident patient who fractured his arm; cooking can help him use muscles that will help him regain mobility and strength. Cooking can also be used as a fun and tasty motivator to a child with a learning disability. There’s nothing better than getting to enjoy the fruits of your labor!
The simple movement of picking up and gripping a wine glass or a salad plate can also help patients relearn movements that they may have lost. Not only that, but cooking is emotionally therapeutic to many. If you’re an occupational therapist, consider adding meal preparation to your therapeutic offerings. It’s an enjoyable task for both therapists and patients alike.
As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, Drinking Wine Can Be a Part of Your Beauty Routine, wine can help improve both your health and beauty. Because of this (and because I like to relax and have fun!), I have started hosting monthly “wine and beauty nights” with a few of my close girlfriends. We’re all married, work full-time, and several of us have young children, so it’s nice to be able to get away from the stress of daily life to get together and relax.
On a typical Wine and Beauty Night, I do the following:
We start in the kitchen and living room, tasting wine and food, and chatting about our day. After about an hour, we head upstairs to wash off our makeup and change into robes before the real fun begins! The format of the beauty portion changes based on who is in attendance. Some of the girls are representatives for beauty companies such as Arbonne or Mary Kay, so if they present their products that evening, we typically focus on that brand only. Other times, each person will bring one or two of their favorite products for everyone to try out. We try everything from facial masks to nail polish to under-eye concealer. It’s a fun way to discover new products and to talk about what’s working for us.
I highly recommend having a wine and beauty night in your home. It’s a fun way to get together with some of your closest friends!
I find making wine from all kinds of fruits terribly exciting. That’s why I want to run through the steps I take to prepare my home made black cherry wine. It’s interesting that wine made from cherries doesn’t age particularly well. It’s best drunk between the 6 to 18 month mark.
Black cherries are native to the United States and can be found in many locations. They are abundant all over the Eastern half of the country as well as through Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The wine tastes good and I recommend you give it a shot if you haven’t made it before.
The Winemaking Home Page tells us:
More than anything else, it is the conversion of sugar into carbon dioxide and alcohol by the action of yeast that makes wine. A critical amount of sugar simply must be present or you are wasting your time and ingredients. When this amount is absent, you must add sugar.
So it’s of vital importance that we use fully ripened fruit in our wine making. The best cherry picking month, for the ripest fruit, is September. Even with the ripest cherries, it’s going to be necessary to add sugar before you transfer to the secondary.
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