The Best Recipe for Making Grape Wine at Home

How to Make Grape Wine at Home the Right Way

Here’s an easy recipe, the best recipe I would say, for making grape wine at home the right way. My recipe will help you learn how to make delicious red wine for Christmas in 21 days. This recipe can be used for making grape wine with black or red grapes. Follow my recipe correctly and you’ll be able to make a robust, elegant wine, bursting with flavour and which tastes exactly like commercially available port wine. It would make a great Christmas wine.

You might also like to check out my other wine recipe – Ginger Wine at home in 12 days.

Ingredients

1.5 kg red globe grapes

800g (3 ¾ cups + 1 tbsp) granulated sugar

1.25 litres (around 5 cups) water

¾ tsp yeast

50g wheat

100g black raisins with seeds

Some brandy

(You could follow the same recipe, with or without the raisins to make the grape wine with black grapes.)

Procedure

1. Sanitize every bit of equipment used in this recipe and your hands too. This will help preserve your homemade wine without the use of preservatives, stabilisers, or other chemicals.
2. Prepare a sugar syrup with the sugar and water. Bring the solution to a boil, simmer it for 2-3 minutes and then let it cool.
3. Wash the wheat grains well with plain water and then roast them on a tawa or frying pan for a few minutes till they are dry again and well sanitized. Transfer them to a sanitized bowl.
4. Wash the grapes with tap water first, then sprinkle 2 tbsp salt on them and keep them immersed in salt water for around 15 minutes. Then drain the salt water and wash them several times with boiled and cooled water. Put them into a colander to drain off the excess water.
5. With your clean hands separate the grapes from the stalks and stems. Rinse the grapes once with boiled and cooled water, then crush them and transfer them to a fermentation jar, a glass or ceramic one, or a jar made of food grade plastic. It’s capacity should be around 3 litres. Pour the cooled sugar syrup into the jar.
6. Wash the raisins first with plain water, then soak them in boiling hot water for 30 minutes. Drain the water away and rinse them with boiled and cooled water and chop them roughly into halves.
7. Add the raisins to the jar and give the contents a stir.
8. Add the yeast and stir it the grape mixture again.
9. Cover the mouth of the jar with a clean folded kitchen napkin and then secure it with a string. Place the lid lightly over the covered mouth of the jar. Place the jar in a cool and dark space in your house. If it is transparent, cover it with a clean and thick kitchen towel.
10. Vigorous fermentation will start in a few hours. Leave the jar in the dark place for 12 days during which the primary fermentation will take place. But every day, on each of those 12 days, open the mouth of the jar and give the contents of the jar a good stir. And then tie the napkin over the mouth of the jar again. Carbon dioxide gas will get released due to the fermentation taking place inside the jar. The cloth napkin allows the gas to escape into the air and also allows oxygen to enter. During this first fermentation, contact with oxygen is good because this helps the yeast grow well and also produce more alcohol.
11. On the 13th day, open the mouth of the jar, and filter the contents through a steel strainer lined with a napkin or through a water filter. Collect the wine in a jar or steel vessel. It will be around 2.5 litres in volume. Discard the grape skins and other solids held back by the strainer.
12. Fill the filtered wine into narrow mouthed glass or food grade plastic bottles. Fill them almost to the top of the bottles leaving a head space of around two inches. Secondary fermentation will take place in these bottles. We’ll let the secondary fermentation carry on for 9 days. Though around 80% of the fermentation takes place during the primary fermentation, it takes place at a slower place drying the secondary one. During this time, a small quantity of carbon dioxide is released. Also contact with oxygen should be kept to a minimum or not allowed to take place at all because it could convert some of the wine into vinegar. Which means during this stage we have to allow the carbon dioxide from the fermenter vessels to escape and at the same time keep the oxygen out. Serious home brewers use fermentation vessels with airlocks which make both these requirements possible. But for simple home brewing, you could achieve this, though not as efficiently as an airlock, by storing the bottles in a dark space, and then once every day, for all the 9 days, taking off the caps of the bottles briefly, for around 15 to 20 seconds to let the carbon dioxide from the bottles escape and then screwing them on firmly again.
13. Also, the bottles should not be moved at all throughout the period of secondary fermentation, because we want the wine to become clearer during this period and don’t want to disturb the sediment settling at the bottom of the bottles.
14. On the 22^nd day, after 21 days of fermentation, filter the wine again, discarding the segment and a few teaspoons of the wine at the bottom.
15. Bottle the wine. It will be much clearer now. But if you give it even more standing time, it will become still clearer.
16. Fortify the grape wine with brandy (30ml or two tablespoons / 750 ml of wine).

Cheers!