Wine Making Equipment

There are a lot of good sites out there with supplies

is a good one.

I / we would be glad to help. Please give us some more information.

How much wine do you plan to make?

Are you going to use fresh grapes, kits or both?

How technical do you want to get in this hobby such as using recipes only or inventing your own?

What kind and style of wine are you going to make?

Paul's questions are the right ones.

What you want to make, how you want to make it, how much of it you want to make, where you are, and how likely are you to stick with for many years or just to try it.

You could go as sparse as a kit wine, a carboy or two, an airlock, a siphon hose, some chemicals.

Alternatively you might be more inclined to make larger quantities of wine from fresh grapes. In which case, you would need some type of crusher / destemmer; a press; a fermenting vessel (ranging from a larg plastic bucket to barrels, bins, or stainless tanks); some aging vessels (ranging from carboys to stainless tanks to oak barrels); some laboratory set up, some racking hardware, etc ...

In other words, there are a lot of variables - depending on your plans per those questions.

A good place for supplies, and also for good info and advice, is MoreWine ...

Mr. Tager! Brohim! If you and your few thousand are in the greater Boston area, it would be my pleasure to be your winemaking personal shopper! I have a *cousin* who can get things for you at a great price!... The previous contributors raise pertinent points about your present and future commitment to this hobby/lifestyle. You can easily blow a grand on one or two pieces of sexy equipment that may amount to "overkill" regarding your level of commitment. Post more info & you'll get better, more specific advice. A good place to start is: 1) How many bottles / cases do you want to end up with per outing/ fermentation/ attempt & 2) Fresh grapes, juices, or kits? Semi-seriously, if yer near Beantown, I know people... HTH, regards, bob.

I second Wayne's suggestion! For a long time I avoided this hobby altogether because, although the idea of making my own wine appealed to me, I thought it would be an incredibly huge amount of work (seeing how my father had approached it, which was to get the "whole setup" as Tager mentioned and do everything in the "official" correct way). For me, this is a hobby, not a profession, and therefore it carries a requirement of being 90% fun and only

10% work! (If it was the other way around, I wouldn't do it. It would feel too much like a real job, but without the pay and medical insurance.)

Fortunately I discovered, from reading various sites and postings on the web, that winemaking can be just about as labor-intensive and complicated or as simple and easy as you want to make it, if you are just making it for your own pleasure. I have thus taken a sort of minimalist approach:

-- no hydrometer

-- no primary vs. secondary fermentation vessels

-- no sulfites (one might view this as a plus for health and flavor too)

-- no bottling and corking

-- no buying my own grapes or pressing my own juice (except for that one batch of "premium fist-squeezed" blackberry wine I started last summer... :-)

-- no filtering

-- no barrel aging

-- no kit

-- no official recipe (I make up my own)

Believe it or not, the results have always been drinkable, and frequently quite yummy. Total cost for equipment for this approch surprised me as being almost unbelievably cheap. What I use:

-- 4 liter glass jug (free!). Just buy a 4L jug of Rossi wine (around $9 here, but I consider that the price of the wine, and that makes the jug itself free). Despite the low price of this wine, some of the varieties are actually pretty good. (Personally I like the Paisano, Sangria, and Rhine, and my wife, who is much more picky, even likes the Sangria.)

-- Rubber bung with hole in it (95 cents).

-- Airlock ($1.00).

-- Another rubber bung without a hole in it for aging (95 cents). Since I don't use sulfites, I don't use the screw cap for aging because I don't want any bottles exploding on me because some little bit of fermentation is still going on, which it often is for a few months without sulfites.

-- Frozen juice concentrates from the grocery store (anywhere from about $2 to $6 per batch, depending on what you get). Three of these is the right amount to make a 4L batch. Concentrates also add the freedom to make a stronger dessert-type wine by using 4 or 5 instead of 3. And you get all sorts of flavors and colors to choose from! And they are pre-sterilized!

-- Pinch of yeast wine (a few cents). I use the Pasteur Champagne yeast variety. One yeast packet is 95 cents here and will make 15-20 batches if you just use a pinch. Trust me, the yeast will take care of multiplying on its own, and you can use much less than the packet says you need.

-- Sugar as needed to get an alcohol level somewhere in the ballpark (a few cents). The juice concentrates will tell you how much sugar they already have in them per serving on the nutrition information label. Generally it's

6 servings per 12oz can, so just multiply this by 18 if using three cans. To add more, I use the rule of thumb that each 80g of sugar will make approximately 1% alcohol in a 4L batch, and one cup of granulated sugar is about 200g hence will produce about 2.5% alcohol.

-- Siphon assembly (about $5).

-- Sometimes I put in yeast micronutrients and/or macronutrients. $5 worth will last for dozens of batches. It will still ferment without these, only slower. I haven't decided yet if there is any noticeable difference in the taste of the final product.

-- Pectic enzyme is not generally needed for frozen juice concentrates as they have already taken care of clarifying it at the "factory."

-- Boiled water (sometimes with a decaf tea bag for tannins) (~free).

-- Bleach for sterilization (99 cents a gallon or so).

-- Paper and masking tape to make a light shield for the jug (~free).

-- Plastic grocery store produce bag as a safety in case of airlock clogging (free).

Boil the water for the must the night before so it will be room temp when you need it. The day of, rinse the jug with bleach and water, then rinse well with water. Pour all ingredients into the jug. Put on the screw cap and shake it up. Remove screw cap, replace with the holey bung and airlock. Slide the paper light shield over the top (not needed if you keep it out of the light), and slide the plastic bag on over top of the whole thing so if the airlock clogs and blows out, the explosion will be contained in the bag rather than being an interior decorating disaster. (Learned the hard way with that premium fist-squeezed wild blackberry wine I mentioned earlier...)

Let ferment for a month or so. Then rack it into another jug "every once in a while" thereafter until no more sediment forms. Usually 2-3 rackings is enough. After the batch is about three months along and racked a couple times, replace the airlock assembly with the solid rubber bung, pop the plastic bag back on top (at this point more so you can find the bung again if it blows out and also help keep air out if that happens, than to avert any true disaster), and let sit for however long you want to age it. I have heard 9-12 months for whites, 12-24 months for reds. (Note that I have had some bungs blow out when I used to wait less time before replacing the airlock and before I used the plastic bag trick, and the jugs probably sat there for a week or so open to the air, yet the wine still came out fine. The main problem was finding the bung because these apparently make irresistible kitty toys if left lying around on the basement floor unattended! :-)

Then if you want a sweet wine, just add a bit of sugar to taste in the glass when you finally drink it!

Total one-time costs are something like $15 for the base equipment and supplies, then an incremental cost of at most $6-7 per 4L batch and literally less than one hour of labor per batch, including all the racking. Have you ever heard of a less expensive hobby? Other advantages are: if a batch spoils, you have only lost six bucks and at most an hour of your time; and you get to try lots and lots of different wines. If you drink a glass of wine for dinner every day, you'll find a 4L jug will last about three weeks, so you get to make 17 or 18 different wines a year and find out what you like, what works, and what doesn't.

I think there are an infinite variety of approaches to making wine, and you shouldn't feel constrained in how you "have to" or "should" do it. Do as much or as little as you like, and find the right way for your own happiness. If that is getting the "whole setup," then by all means don't let me talk you out of it! You are doing it to make yourself happy, not any of us out here. I just wanted to point out the incredible freedom of choice that exists in this hobby. Your range of options and costs for making decent wine may be a lot wider than you had realized!

Kevin Cherkauer Utopia in Decay

My advice would be to start small. 5-gallon batches. Read about the processes. Get accustomed to the processes by DOING them. This will get you thinking about how, (or if), you want to scale.

-Racking

-Transferring

-Measuring

-Cleaning

-Sanitizing

-Bottling

-Corking

My take is to try these, fail at them, improve your processes. This will guide your winery equipement purchases.

For me, this is easy, because the technical details consume me. I am always saying, "Man, if i only had this, or that"

B

WOW! I have to thank all of you for the great responses. Great, great information. Looks like I really need to make sure of what i want to do before taking the next step.

Buying juice instead of buying grapes would probably cut the equipment expense drastically. On the ranch where I work and live there is a very old screw press, dating to the late 1800s, that could still press grapes.... but buying the juice seems so much easier. :-)

The first and only batch of wine I have made cost around $45 in equipment.