Adventures in Homemade Wine Making – Part 1
I am impatiently awaiting my allotment of grapes to come in this year. My living room is filled with odd tubing, brushes, giant buckets, glass carboys and so many bungs. I have spent the last few nights prepping, sorting and cleaning my wine making supplies in preparation for the call that my wine grapes are finally ready for me to pick up!
All this prep and work and equipment is ready to go so that I can take some grape juice and turn it (hopefully) into some delicious wine!
I have made wine before, twice actually. In 2016 and 2017 I made wine with my good friend Jack out of our apartment in San Francisco.
Our first year we made a Merlot from a kit. It was an awesome experience for two guys who love to drink wine and make stuff.
We did not know what we were doing. So we made some mistakes and learned so much! Like: you should measure and record everything. Or reusing all your old wine bottles for homemade wine sounds like a great idea, but the collecting, storing, cleaning and sanitizing of all those bottles is a ton of work! Or how to properly use a corker, this was a tough one!
We had a blast making the wine and doing all the sciency stuff that goes along with it. All the manual processes really brought us close to our final product.
Even with all our mistakes and learnings I am proud to say our first wine turned out quite delicious. We had to open it up a good 30 min before we wanted to drink it but once the wine opened up it had good flavors and complexity. I loved to bring it to gatherings and share with friends. The best part being their shock that Jack and I had made it ourselves. Plus is only cost us about $2.50 per bottle to make all in. When judging it against other wines at that price point it was even more impressive what we had accomplished on our first try.
Our surprisingly good first batch hooked us on the wine making bug. Prompting Jack and I to sign on for a pre-order of real grapes the next summer. (Thanks to Oak Barrel in Berkeley for all the help and hooking us up with grapes!) We decided to try our hand at making a Malbec. Our grapes came precrushed and destemmed in a giant fermenting bucket ready for us to work our magic turning this soupy mush into a fine wine.
We took what we learned from the prior year and tried to improve our process. We ended up breaking a measuring device so we could not take early brix and original gravity. But we pushed along. Fermenting our giant bucket and trying to make trips home from work to punch down the cap when possible.
We ended up making one large mistake during the fermentation. The yeast was doing it’s work real well the fist few days, the chemical reactions happening inside the wine vat started to heat up the juice.
We figured the cool fall weather in our San Francisco apartment in the “wine closet” in our living room would be cool enough, but it ended up getting a bit too hot in their. We think this contributed to our wine tasting a bit jammier and sweeter than we would have liked. It would have been nice to have those original measurements to help guide us timing the fermentation where we could have taken the wine a bit drier than where we stopped it.
Next we rented a pressing machine. This was a fun process to seperate our now fermented wine from the skins and grape chunks.
After the pressing, the wine aged for about 8 months in glass carboys. With about half of this time on oak. We used little dice sized chunks of French oak to help give more depth and flavor to the wine.
Finally about a year later we were ready to bottle our second vintage.
We used different corks this time. Which meant we had different problems!
Our Malbec ended up turning out event better than our Merlot. It was a bit to sweet at the beginning but as it has aged over the last year and a half the flavors have rounded out quite well. It is a fruit forward wine with a dark leathery, tobacco finish.
After two pretty darn successful vintages under our belts. We had to take off last year from wine making due to traveling and moving.
Now being settled in Santa Barbara, I am excited to make some wine here with local grapes.
I am planning to work with a local winemaker, David Potter from Potek and Muni Wines, who was kind enough to help hook me up with some grapes. The plan is to try to make a white and a red varietal this year. I should be getting the juice to make a Riesling this week and the grapes to make a Syrah next week.
I am so excited to again begin a journey down the wine making path. Try some new things, make it a little better and keep learning.
I am looking forward to getting started and sharing the process and the eventual product with all who are willing to hear me yap about it and give it a taste.
Cheers!
-Alan Evans