Your Winemaking Educational Source
With all the sanitizing, racking, and testing you’ll be doing it’s easy to see how wine making can get messy. Without the proper area you’ll definitely be leaving your mark. Let’s look at what sort of area will work best for your wine making operation.
The most important factors are: Continue reading “Where to Set Up Your Wine Making Operation”
It’s inexpensive, easy to use, and easy to neglect. The cost of neglecting it, however, is all the wine your making. So what is this little savior of wine?
The airlock.
Continue reading “The Most Neglected Piece of Winemaking Equipment”
Wine kits are by far the least expensive way to get into wine making. It requires the least amount of equipment and makes the smallest amount of wine. Let’s take a look at what determines the cost to make wine for the first time.
The Equipment I Purchased
To get started I picked up the Vintner’s Reserve Shiraz wine kit. This included the grape juice concentrate and nearly all of the additives required to make the wine. However, wine kits do not include any equipment.
With that in mind I picked up this wine making equipment kit from Midwest Supplies. This kit included the following:
Continue reading “How Much Does it Cost to Make Wine from a Kit?”
Reusing wine bottles is the perfect way to save some money when making your own wine. The problem is how do you remove the labels?
I’ve found there are mainly three types of labels, paper, plastic, and plastic coated paper. Paper labels are easy as they’ll come off after only a few minutes in water. Plastic labels peel off but leave a mess (more on that below).
The toughest labels to remove are the plastic coated paper labels. They don’t peel off and water can’t penetrate the plastic so you can’t soak it off.
After a bit of practice, however, I stumbled upon a method that works really well for paper and plastic coated paper labels. Check out this video to see how I do it. Continue reading “How to Remove Wine Labels”
A racking cane is simply a hard plastic tube used to siphon wine from one container to another. Despite their simplicity they can be a bit tricky to use.
The most difficult part of using this device is getting the flow of wine going. While you could suck on the end of the tube like a straw to get the siphon started this is hardly a sanitary way to make wine.
I’ll show you the best way I’ve found to use the racking cane. It takes a little practice but once you get the hang of it it’s really easy.