Making wine from grapes at home is easy.

To make 4.5L/1 Gallon here’s what you’ll need and the Step by step instructions.

Equipment needed to make 4.5 Litres/1 Gallon (6 Bottles):

5 Litre/1Gallon Carboy with Grommet & Airlock – you can get 5L water bottles in supermarkets cheap – just drill a hole in top for the airlock
2 x 10 litre/2Gallon fermenting buckets
Auto Siphon (Homebrew store/online)
Straining Bag (Muslin or Net curtain will do)
Hydrometer with Case (homebrew store, some supermarkets or online)
Baby bottle sterilising tablets
Bottles

These instructions are for making wine from grapes, please read thoroughly before you start.

6-7 Kilos (13-15lbs) of grapes to produce 4.5 litres/ 1 Gallon(ish) of finished wine. Get wine grapes in you can

Clean and sterilise everything

1. Crush the grapes and put everything into the fermenter. We ideally want 5 litres/1 Gallon of juice in the bucket (you might be short at this stage). Take some juice and measure the gravity with a hydrometer. The gravity on the hydrometer needs to be between 1078 and 1095 depending on how strong you want your wine. 1090 will typically produce a wine with 13% ABV while at 1078 you can expect 11.5% ABV. You can adjust this by adding grape concentrate (which we would recommend) or dissolved sugar. Both of these will increase the gravity. If you use really ripe grapes your gravity should be OK.
2. The temperature of the liquid should be room temp. The grapes will have yeast on their skins which will ferment the wine.
3. Put the lid on the fermenter with an airlock. Leave at a temperature between 20-27°C to ferment for a week.
4. Stir daily for the first week to dunk the grapes in liquid
5. Now siphon the contents of the fermenter into a sanitised 2nd fermenter through muslin and strainer. Squeeze muslin to extract all the juice. Fit the lid and airlock
6. After another week siphon the contents of fermenter two into a carboy. Check gravity with a hydrometer at this stage. It should be around 0.996 to 1.000. Now measure your alcohol abv by taking your starting hydrometer reading and your final reading and plugging them into an online abv calculator. Google “Brewers friend online abv calculator”
7. Leave for a month or until clear (Don’t move your carboy too much. You don’t want to disturb the trub at the bottom). Clearing may take several months, so it’s probably best to transfer to a second carboy and do the optional part below. In any case, when you come to bottle, transfer to a bottling bucket without splashing too much. Then go to stage 8

Optional –
To get a smoother wine – At this stage you can decant to another carboy to de-gas co2 and clear further. Degas by shaking the 2nd carboy (with a stopper inserted) vigorously, then vent pressure by carefully loosening stopper (careful – pressure will build). Do this over 4 or 5 days until no more pressure builds. You can now let it sit for another month to clear further

8. Adjusting Sweetness – Taste the wine and decide if it needs sweetening. Ignore all other factor like sharpness and acidity and roundness. All these will change in time. Most wines will need some form of additional sweetness so don’t be afraid to do this. Add sweeteners (dissolved in boiling water) to your bottling bucket (not sugar as this may ferment out). Keep doing this until the wine is to your taste. What the wine will really taste like won’t be seen until the acidity has been adjusted, the wine has had 3-4 weeks to mature.
9. Siphon into bottles. If using corks then sit upright for 2 days then lay flat. This conditions the corks. Leave for a few months and enjoy