Thread: Homemade Country Wine Production

Looks good

Beautiful coloration!

I start the 160 bottle rack tomorrow, a write-up with pictures will follow. I went to Home Depot very early this morning to buy the materials.

Really nice looking. Great color

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Originally Posted by Slab

Really nice looking. Great color

It is still a little harsh around the edges that only time will smooth out. Homemade wine needs time in the bottle too. The bulk aging I did really cleared them up making them very easy to polish but now bottled things will speed up in the smoooooth department.

Recipe is for 3 Gallons finished wine
4 Cups Key Lime Juice
1 3# Can Oregon Raspberry Puree
10 Pound Bag Sugar
3 Boxes Golden Raisins
Distilled Water to 4 Gallon Mark
4 Tsp Yeast Nutrient
3 Tsp Pectic Enzyme
4 Campden Tablets
1 pack EC-1118 Lavin Yeast

Added Lime juice and Raspberry Puree to mesh bag in fermenter. Chopped raisins and added to bag.
Put 1 gallon distilled water in a large pot. Added sugar then warmed stirring till sugar melted.
Added sugar water to primary after cooling but do not pour in fine mesh bag it won't drain thru.
Stirred then added yeast nutrient and pectic enzyme. Crushed 4 campden tablets stirring again.

Pitched the yeast 24 hours later.

After 10 days or so Racked wine into clean carboy and topped off with reserves in fridge.
Siphoned by mouth and taste was vastly better than reserves in fridge.

30 days later Racked wine into clean carboy and topped off with reserves in fridge.
Tasted even better.

batch starting SG 1.130

2 months later Racked today. Topped up with left over Raz-a-rita in fridge. Taste great. Leave fine sediment till bottling.

7 months later Filtered Wine today. Ending specific gravity 1.038 ABV 12.3%

Next day Using 1/2 cup distilled water I pitched 1/4tsp Metabisulfite and 3 tsp Sorbate preparing to bottle. The combined
Batch 1 and 2 was 6 gallons total.

Bottled 30 bottles after 48 hours allowing the Metabisulfite to work. Black shrink seal was used.

Back to the Satsuma wine for a minute. My Bud provided 2 5Gal buckets of the fruit. He waited too long for picking to use the zest in the skins, they looked too rough for me. I thought a 6 gallon batch was stretching it a bit for the amount of fruit and vocalized that. My bud was of the opinion more wine - less quality. So I learned a lesson here I want to share. Don't make wine with other people providing the fruit, just buy what you don't have. If you don't have enough fruit especially with Citrus down size your batch size, do not push it up to the next gallon. In 3 times now I've made orange based wines although this is the best so far I think there is quite a bit of room for improvement.

Well I only could fit 19 rows so I lost the capacity for 8 bottles. Watching a few YouTube videos before starting gave me a idea of what to make.



I made notes of the formulas exampled on YouTube but they didn't work for me except figuring out rows and columns, number of risers, and number of rungs. Once I laid out the first riser clamping it securely first I transferred the layout to the remaining 18 risers. This sped up the process quite a bit.



Needing 304 rungs out came the tablesaw. The radius sides of the appearance boards is needed as the bottles rest on the curved portion. I ran the boards on the tablesaw cutting 3/4in rung material. After ripping what was needed I moved over to the miter saw setting up a block as a stop so all the rungs would be exactly the same length. I cut three at a time speeding up the miter saw work.



Clamping a stop on the end of the plywood work surface square with the riser ends allowed me to shoot the rungs on the marks without worrying if out of square.



Each end riser gets only rungs on one side but the balance of rungs in the middle get a set of rungs on each side.




After attaching the rear braces I was able to stand the wood wine rack up for the first time.