Making wine in a nutshell

My white wine was finally done yesterday!

When you live in Saudi, you probably know, that making your own wine is one of the rare possibilities to get something to drink.  The good thing about Saudi on the opposite side is: Large supermarkets such as Carrefour and Panda are equipped in a way, that getting your stuff together for your wine is simple as 123. I think they know, why funnels and grape juice are among their best selling products.

What you need for your wine

You just need yeast, sugar and some fruit juice. Take an empty 5-liter water-can and fill it with about 4 liters of grape juice, red or white, up2u. add about 300 grams of sugar and mix it so sugar and juice are fully bound. Put a tea-spoon of yeast in a glass with 37°-warm water and wait 5 minutes until the yeast breaks open and merges with the water. Add this mix to the wine aswell. That was the easy part.

Cutting off the yeast’s oxygen supply

To make the yeast convert sugar to alcohol, you need to cut off the oxygen supply; meanwhile the yeast is producing large quantities of CO2 when converting sugar to alcohol; so if you just close the bottle to cut off oxygen supply, it will explode within one or two days. To let the CO2 out of the bottle, but oxygen not enter the bottle, you can buy either one of those fancy ventils, that let gas out but not in (not available in Saudi, cause everybody knows what you’re gonna do with it) or you have to build this on your own. To do this, you need to put a straw through a hole in the cap of the bottle and place the end of this straw in water. Seal the hole around the straw with silicon or candle wax, so the only way for gas out of and into the bottle is through the straw. Now with CO2 produced by the yeast building overpressure in the bottle, the CO2 will pass off from the bottle through the water the end of the straw is hanging in. But at the same time, no oxygen can enter the bottle. Voilà. I’ll post a foto of this construction as soon as I’m at home tonight; I’m not sure whether it’s understandable without this…

Now sit and wait… but in 2 weeks it’s done

If everything went right, about 12-24h later the CO2 will start to escape through the straw and “bubble” into the water. About 10-14 days later this bubbling will stop and all sugar is converted to alcohol. If you’re not in Saudi and have the time to wait because you can easily buy something around the corner instead of taking your own wine, winemaking.com recommends to wait another 6-12 months. If you don’t have this time, you can leave the bottle for 24h in the fridge so the yeast sets off to the bottom of the bottle. Pouring the wine in another bottle now will leave most of the yeast in the first bottle; you can now filter the wine again through a coffee filter or a towel, but this won’t really change the result anymore. You’re now the proud owner of your first “Federweisser”, not yet a young wine, but a fermented grape must, good for about 8-10% of alcohol.

Now if you have any additional hints on improving or easy the method of making wine, please let me know. Cheers!

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