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Whoever has his own vineyard in his country house will hardly be able to resist the temptation to learn winemaking. Home cooking makes the drink real and healthy. White wine is more complex in terms of preparation technology, but is considered more refined. If you want to surprise even gourmets, then try making homemade wine in an original way from your own white grapes. Popular white varieties in the Moscow region and Central Our Country are Lydia, Kishmish white, Alpha, Bianca, Aligote, Chardonnay, Valentina. Muscat white grape varieties (Isabella, Muscat white) are suitable for making rosé wines.
You can get a light drink from any variety, but the excessive astringency of dark varieties will be inappropriate in white wine.
Collection and preparation of berries
White grape varieties ripen later than dark ones, besides, for white wine, the berries are recommended to be slightly overexposed. Some growers leave the bunches until the first frost, others prefer to pick berries with a slight sourness. Thus, different taste shades of white wine are obtained.
Wines made from white grapes can be dessert and dry. Desserts are made from overripe berries with a high sugar content. Dry wines require berries with more acidity, so they are harvested immediately after full maturation. Both options have their own nuances (including the weather conditions of the season and the climate of the region), so the scope for experimentation is huge.
The collected bunches of grapes should lie down for 2 days in a cool place. White grapes for homemade wine cannot be washed. A stream of water will wash away the wild wine yeast and there will be no fermentation. You can add purchased dry wine yeast, but it is the wild ones that the craftsmen appreciate. Preparation of berries consists in careful sorting and culling of cracked, rotten and affected grapes. Twigs can be left to give the drink a “zest”.
Container handling
It is ideal for fermenting homemade wine to purchase a glass bottle of 10 or 20 liters, depending on the scale of your production. It is better to store the finished wine in glass bottles with ground wooden corks. It is allowed to use ceramic and enameled dishes, but it is not so convenient with it (the sediment is not visible, it is difficult to understand the moment of clarification). It is also possible to prepare white wine from grapes in wooden barrels, but they are more difficult to disinfect (fuming with sulfur).
All tools and cutlery in contact with grape juice must be stainless steel. The containers and tools are pre-cleaned with baking soda, rinsed thoroughly with running water and dried.
The main differences in the technology of making white wine
The type of wine served in a restaurant should complement the selected dishes, revealing their sophistication. White wine differs from red not in the color of the grapes used. White wine has a more delicate and delicate taste, devoid of the astringency of the skin of the berries. The skin also contains coloring pigments, which are not found in white wine. Consequently, the main technological difference in the preparation of white wine is the exclusion of contact between the squeezed juice and the skin of the berries.
For white wine, white grape varieties with low acidity are suitable. Classic recipes do not involve the addition of sugar, as it is assumed that the berries are quite sweet. In any case, the amount of sugar added to homemade white wine is negligible.
Stages of the technological process
Those with experience in making homemade wines understand the importance of maintaining sterility throughout the process. Make it a rule to treat hoses and tools daily with a 2% soda solution. The technology for making white wine includes 6 stages:
- obtaining grape juice;
- settling and removal of sediment;
- active fermentation;
- “silent” fermentation;
- removal from sediment and filtration;
- pouring young wine into containers and aging.
Consider the features of each of them.
Getting grape juice
For white wine, the juice should not come into contact with the skin. The best way to make quality juice is to get it by gravity. In this case, the grape juice is released under the influence of gravity, and the berries themselves act as a press. You will get light juice without pulp impurities. The only drawback of this method is that it takes a long time to get juice.
For large volumes, this option may not be suitable. Then the juice is carefully squeezed out by hand. The use of presses and juicers is contraindicated, as the technique can damage the bones and unwanted substances will enter the drink, which will affect its quality.
Sedimentation and removal of sediment
At home, freshly squeezed grape juice will turn cloudy. This wort needs to be improved. Settling is carried out in a glass bottle for 6 – 12 hours in a cool place.
To prevent premature fermentation, the wort must be fumigated with a sulfur wick. To do this, a burning wick is lowered into an empty bottle (without touching the walls) and as soon as it burns out, the wort is poured into 1/3 of the volume of the container, closed with a lid and slightly stirred to dissolve the gas. Then lower the wick again, add another portion and mix. The procedure is repeated several times until the bottle is filled.
When the suspension settles and the juice becomes lighter, it is poured into a clean bottle for fermentation through a siphon or tube.
Some recipes call for sulfitation of the wort (adding sulfur dioxide), but at home, fumigation is enough to have a similar effect.
active fermentation
As already noted, wild yeast is found on the surface of grapes. Since the berry skin is not involved in the preparation of must for white wine, there will be little yeast in it. As a result, fermentation will be capricious and longer. Capriciousness is expressed in a special sensitivity to the temperature regime. Immediately choose a place with the possibility, if necessary, of heating or ventilation. The optimum fermentation temperature should be between 18 and 24 degrees Celsius.
The next necessary condition for the proper course of fermentation is the termination of oxygen access to the wort. To do this, they organize a water lock (they lower the hoses to remove fermentative carbon dioxide into cans of water) or instead of lids, they put on rubber gloves with several punctures from the needle.
Under optimal conditions, active fermentation of white grape juice takes about 1 week, after which the process fades, but does not stop.
“Silent” fermentation
To make homemade wine stronger at the stage of “quiet” fermentation, sugar is added to it. What gives sugar? Yeast breaks down sugar to form alcohol. The content of natural sugars in the berries of even sweet varieties of white grapes will make it possible to obtain wine with a strength of no more than 12%, and with the addition of granulated sugar – up to 16%. It is necessary to add sugar at the stage of “silent” fermentation after measuring the alcohol content. However, there are recipes in which sugar is mixed directly with the wort.
During “silent” fermentation, the stability of the temperature and liquid in the bottle is important. You can not mix the contents or even just rearrange them to another place. This stage lasts 3-4 weeks. There are two signs of process termination:
- lack of small bubbles;
- a clear distinction between sediment and clarified young wine.
Some experienced winemakers also use the third sign: when tasting young wine, sugar should not be felt. But not every beginner will be able to give the correct conclusion on the analysis of the taste of wine. If you need to make a dessert semi-sweet wine, then the fermentation is artificially interrupted by sharply lowering the temperature.
De-sludge and filtration
It is necessary to remove young wine from the sediment without fail and immediately. At this stage, a container with fermented wine is placed on the table (carefully so as not to disturb the sediment), and clean sterilized bottles are placed on the floor. Using a hose or tube, the drink is poured by gravity, without lowering the hose close to the sediment. Then the rest of the wine with yeast sediment is poured into a smaller container, left to settle and the drain procedure is repeated.
The remaining precipitate is filtered through several layers of gauze. The filtrate is added to the bottles to the middle of the neck. Bottles of wine are corked and put in a cool place (no more than 15 degrees) for 30 days. This completes the first stage of filtering.
After 30 days, the young wine is again poured into clean bottles, leaving sediment at the bottom.
Bottling and aging
Filled wine bottles are closed with lids and stored lying down at a temperature of no more than 15 degrees.
Before drinking, the wine is aged from 2 months to several years (depending on the variety).
By following a few simple guidelines, you can be sure of the success of the grape drink.
Best recipes
Of the variety of ways to make homemade white wine, we note the most interesting.
Wine from frozen berries
To make wine, slightly unripe white grapes are preliminarily sorted and frozen for 24 hours. Exposure to low temperatures reveals the brightness of the aroma and the freshness of the taste. Since the grapes are not ripened, sugar is added (for 10 kg of grapes – 3 kg of sugar). The juice should be squeezed out without waiting for the berries to completely defrost. Further, the cooking recipe coincides with the classical scheme.
Wine made from white and red grapes
White grapes can harmonize with dark ones. Suitable berries of red grapes with white juice. Its addition will give the drink savory notes characteristic of red wine. All berries are mixed and crushed. The resulting mass is heated, but not brought to a boil. Then it must be cooled and left under oppression for 3 days. All recipes with warming up the pulp require the addition of wine yeast. The separation of the pulp is carried out after active fermentation.
Conclusion
Given the rules of all stages of making white wine, you can safely experiment with varieties (take berries of several white varieties), with the degree of ripening of berries, with the amount of added sugar. Depending on the prevailing weather conditions, the quality of grapes will change every year. In order to control the quality of wine to some extent, it is useful to keep a work log, where you can note the peculiarities of the conditions for growing grapes (droughts, heavy rains, record heat or cool summer), the timing of harvesting berries, the subtleties of the fermentation process, and so on.