How to Make Wine from Fruit The Only Wine Recipe You Will Ever Need

Hey YouTubers, welcome back to my channel. Today we're going to discuss wine and how you can make it from home. Uh, I've made several different kinds now. Uh, this is a blueberry, which probably is my absolute favorite. I've made a peach, a strawberry and a strawberry Kiwi. And these all can be made using the exact same recipe. If you just follow these directions that I'm going to give you, you can be a success in this hobby as well as I am. What we're basically going to discuss today is what you need to make homemade wine. We're going to start with the ingredients, uh, what you actually need to have on hand to make good wine. Then we're going to get into the supplies you need. And finally, we're going to actually get involved in making the homemade wine directly from, uh, fruit. Uh, I don't like to use the juices. However you can. I find out that the real fruits are what make good wine. And the whole process I find very interesting. So one of the questions I get asked a lot is how much does it cost to make wine? Uh, if you have access to a fruit orchard and you can get fruit cheap, it can be very inexpensive. You probably make a bottle of wine for about a dollar. Uh, I have to buy all my fruit. I like to use frozen fruit, um, because I think the freshness is frozen right in. So when you're using frozen fruit, I'd probably make a bottle of wine for about $2 a bottle. So it's still a lot cheaper than you can go by, but more impressive is how it tastes. Homemade wine, you can't beat. This blueberry wine is amazing. Uh, the strawberries incredible as well. Um, but you could, if you just follow these simple instructions on these recipes, you can make any fruit wine you like, and it will be outstanding. I promise you. So how long does it take to make homemade wine? Probably about four months. You can get the bottling done. Uh, that's usually about how long I seem to take is wine making cost effective. As I stated, you can probably make a bottle of wine for 50 cents to about two, $3 a bottle. And again, it will be the best wine you ever have. So let's start with primary fermentation. That's the process where you're breaking down the fruit and the sugar and turn it into alcohol. Here are the main ingredients that you'll make to get the primary fermentation going. Uh, first ingredient would be a wine tannin. Then we got yeast nutrient, which will help the yeast bloom faster. You have an acid blend. Uh, then you've got a pectic enzyme, you've got Camden tablets. And of course, finally, what you definitely need is the yeast to get the whole process going. Two other ingredients you'll need if you're planning on sweeten your wine, back sweeten it, which is the process of sweeten it up after the fact of a fermentation. Potassium sorbate will help with that, uh, to make sure that the fermentation doesn't start again. Then I like to use this bentonite, which will help with the filtering process basically as like a clay mixture that is used in, and we'll pull out any, um, particles still in the wine. So again, that will be towards the end of the process and we'll go over that when we get there. One other ingredient you're definitely going to need is the sugar, which will help the alcohol get going. Uh, you can see I buy 25 pound bags. Uh, this particular recipe we're going to use, um, makes about five gallons of wine and it'll take about 11 pounds of sugar to make that five gallons of wine. So let's get into some of the equipment you're going to need to make your wine. You'll need some measuring cups and spoons to measure your contents and your ingredients. You'll need a hydrometer, which will help measure your alcohol content. You'll need this airlock, uh, which will be used to release the carbon dioxide out of your wine. When you're doing the primary fermentation, uh, you'll need sanitizer. Uh, the Star Sand brand works great. We won't get too much into sanitizing. There's a ton of videos out there how to sanitize your equipment. You just need to know you must sanitize your equipment. You don't want bacteria getting into your wine and ruining a whole batch or anything like that. Uh, you'll need a paddle here. The paddle will help you stir your primary fermentation, um, and get things stirred up. Racking tubes, funnels always helpful when you're wanting to drain some final touches of the wine out into your bottles. Definitely need some corks, uh, when you're getting ready to bottle. Again, this batch of wine, we're going to make, uh, we're going to be using a six gallon carboy. And you got to remember when you're putting fruit in, you're taking about a gallon of fruit out once you're finally done. So once we get to this end process, you're going to need some type of corker. Now I do have a fancy one and it was well worth the money. Some of the hand corkers I understand are very hard to use and strenuous and, uh, can break your fingers. This one here works wonderful. It is a pretty heavy duty piece of equipment, but in my opinion, it's a must if you're going to continue to do this and make decent sized batches. All right, so let's get to cooking here. Uh, first thing we're going to need is about 11 pounds of sugar. I'm going to weigh this out on a scale and add water to my pot. So I want to get that sugar dissolved in some hot water. So let's go ahead and add that. So that was five pounds of sugar. We're going to add another six. My pan's not big enough to haul a total of 11 pounds. So now that we've got our 11 pounds of sugar, uh, all measured out, we're going to just going to go ahead and fill this up with water, the stock pot. I'll then put it on the stove and get that not boiling or anything, but just enough to get it dissolved. And then we'll have to let it sit down and cool a little bit before we would add it to the must. Uh, the must will be all the fruit that we are going to grind up next. So now you can see over here, I put the stock pot on the stove, getting the sugar going. I'll keep stirring this until it's completely dissolved and then we'll turn off the heat and just let it cool down a little bit. So here what I'm going to do is start sanitizing my buckets and my equipment that I'm going to need for this first process, which is the primary fermentation. Uh, I'll put about two and a half gallons of water in here. For a half ounce of the, uh, sanitizer, the star sand. These spoons I'm putting in will basically be used to crush my Camden tablets, my measuring cups to measure other ingredients out. I also like to use a water bottle because once I get my primary fermentation in, I'll want to spray down. You want to stir this every day and I use this basically to sanitize this every time I'm stirring the chemicals, uh, sanitize your stirring spoon and we'll get all that going and sanitize. I also will be sanitizing two, two containers that will be crushing the fruit next in. So I'll show you that process and we'll let this soak in there for about a couple minutes and then we'll sit it out to dry. Uh, one other thing I almost forgot, you got to have this, your mesh bag. This mesh bag will hold your food and it's going to make it a lot easier when you're taking all the sediment and the fruit that's in. It's going to be easy to just take this out. This will get 90% of the sediment out and you don't have to kind of keep racking it over and over. So we'll sanitize that as well. What I'm doing here is just rinsing, rinsing the sanitizer that's been soaking for about five minutes on the equipment. So I'll just rinse off because you want to get as much as the sanitizer off as you can. Uh, this will alleviate, you know, any off taste maybe in your wine. Uh, even though it is totally drinkable, the sanitizer you still want to rinse off as much as you can. So I'll finish rinsing this off and let it dry and we'll go from there. So you can see here, basically you want, you're looking for this clear color when you're dissolving this sugar. Once you see that clear color, you're pretty good to cut the heat off and let it cool. Just want to make sure it's kind of cooled down to room temperature before you would add it to your must, which is your smashed up fruit. All right, so now the fun begins. I've got all this fruit here. I got five bags of four pounds. I took about a pound out to use for some of my fruit shakes. I find the sweet spot for the berry mixture for your wine is you want 18 to 19 pounds to make this five batch of final wine that we're going to have. And that'll be about 24, 25 bottles of wine that you'll have. So I'm going to add these in here. Uh, off camera, you didn't see, but I did sanitize our smasher here. You want to kind of use the smasher basically to break up the fruit. You really kind of trying to puncture the skin. So all that juice can come out. So we'll continue to add these and then we'll get to smashing. So a lot of this is thawed out and you can see I'm just starting to just mix things up and basically just trying to puncture a lot of the skins on some of this fruit. It's kind of what you want to happen as you put it in your must bag. Um, you'll find out. That's why I use a six gallon bucket because I'll be taking about a gallon of the pulp out. Um, so I'll just keep working this a little bit, trying to get it most of this stuff punctured that I can. And then we'll go to the next step where we'll put it into the must bag. All right. So you can see here, I'm getting to about the consistency. I'm wanting, uh, just again, trying to break this, the skins. Um, and if you feel up to it, put your feet in here and smash it like they did in the old days. Um, so I'm thinking this is looking pretty good. So I think what we'll do is we'll move into the next step where I'm going to show you what we're going to do. We're going to put this in the must bag and then get some chemicals in it, get some water added. All right. So what I'm going to do now is start now to add some of this fruit to the must bucket. You can see here, I put my cloth around the bucket. This is usually a two person job, but nobody's around the house. So I'm going to try and do this myself. Uh, I'm just going to start to scoop some in here and you'll find that what you want, don't want it to happen is this to fall down in there. So I will scoop this in and when I get low enough, I will just dump it in. You can see, it looks like a lot of fruit, but when it's all done, this will all pretty much be juice, except for maybe about a gallon of it. Just so you know, what's in this mixed berries, it's raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. I think there was just those three pieces of fruit. And, uh, these big bags, I usually get like Walmart or Sam's Club, kind of watch for them to go on sale. It's your best bet. Unless you have access to an orchard, then you're, you're better off. Once you got all your must in your bag here, you kind of want to cinch it up a little bit. I'm not sure I may have broken this one last time, but usually what I do is I'll get it a good gather on it, twist it up really good. You can see that, that juice start to come out already. But I, even when I cinch it up, I still like to put twist ties on here because you're going to be in here, uh, mixing it and stirring it. And I just find these, these hold up. Super well. And just so you know, I did sanitize these, these ties as well. So now we're at the point where we can just add this sugar water. That's been brought up to room temperature. I'm going to take this right up to about the six gallon level. So I'm going to add water. And for this bucket, it's six gallons, probably about an inch or so from the rim. So now I'm just adding water to get it to the right level. I'm just using again, a sanitized cup to add the water. So this cup has been sanitized and that's probably about good right there. One thing I did want to mention is you're making wine. You definitely would like, it's nice to have a book, like a log book of everything you're doing for the different batches. You can see, this is the batch of blueberry wine I made back in February of 2020. And I just keep track of how much ingredients I put in. So as I add these ingredients, I'm pretty much just going to use the same list that I use then, because again, this recipe be used for any fruit. And as long as you stay consistent to these rules, uh, you'll be fine and you'll have perfect wine every time. So let's get started adding some of the chemicals. So it calls for a Campden tablets. So, uh, per gallon, you want one per gallon. So for, since this is really considered a six gallon batch, I'm going to use six of these and the spoons you'll find out really, uh, crush them up very well. Next thing we're going to add is the acid blend. Uh, it calls for three teaspoons of that. And again, you can read the package. And you can see the package. It will pretty much call for, I think it's a half a teaspoon per gallon. So that's why we're going to use three teaspoons of this. And we want four teaspoons of the, uh, use yeast nutrient. And the recipe calls for one and a half teaspoons of the tannin. So that's what this is. The wine tannin. All right. And we want three teaspoons of the pectic enzyme. So we're now at the point where we can stir up all our ingredients we add. Um, so we're just going to try and get this as much down in there and stir it as we can around your bag. Uh, that can always be the tricky part. Uh, you'll notice each day, this bag gets smaller and smaller and smaller. So, uh, we'll just stir this up as best we can see. It's kind of not a really good blue color yet. It's kind of a brownish. So what we'll do is we'll get the airlock on this. I'll show you that and this will have to sit for 24 hours. Um, basically what's happening right now is the Camden tablets will be killing all of the natural yeast that's in the fruit. And that's what you want. You don't want any of the, uh, non-natural yeast in here any longer. So after 24 hours, that's when we'll start the yeast and we'll put a pack of yeast in here that'll get going after 24 hours. So I'll set my alarm for about this exact time tomorrow and get that, uh, yeast in here. And then we should start seeing some fermentation. So I'm not sure if you can see where this is at, but it's right around, uh, 15, a little bit over 15%. So if we check this after it's done fermenting and it usually will read down to the zero, that means this alcohol potential could be 15% alcohol for this batch of wine. Now, one thing you'll find is, uh, as you're racking, you may have to add, you know, additional water or a bottle of wine. So it will go down to 15, but every batch I've made using this recipe and these ingredients has come back, um, a final reading of zero. So I'm pretty confident this will be a 14 to 15% alcohol batch of wine. All right. So now our next step is to get this thing covered up again. You don't want to keep it as covered as much as possible. You know, oxygen tends to be your enemy in making wine. So I've sanitized the lid here, uh, top and bottom. That's what I use that spray bottle for. And you'll, you'll see that here as we move along in the process. So we'll put this down. And then as far as the airlock, you can kind of see here, you want it to that halfway point right there. Um, so we'll push this down in here. Now, again, we won't see any bubble action until we get the yeast in 24 hours from now. So, uh, we got 24 hours. We'll come back and we'll add the yeast and then hopefully we start to see some fermentation. Okay. So it's been 24 hours. We're going to go ahead and add our yeast. Uh, this is basically a wine yeast. Uh, it's active dry. What a lot of people suggest is you put this in warm water and you let it, uh, soak a little bit. But what I find it's best just to pour it straight in. Um, I've had the best results with that. So we're going to go ahead and take our lid off here. And if you could smell this, it smells absolutely amazing. So what I've done, I've already sanitized my spatula here. So I'm just going to tear this pack open. I did leave it out at room temperature. So I'm just going to go ahead and give this a little bit of a stir just to get everything incorporated. But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to pour the yeast directly into here and I'm not even going to stir the yeast in. I'll let it sit on top until tomorrow when I'll actually do a stir. You're going to want to stir this every single day, um, until fermentation stops. So I'll just kind of just sprinkle it where I see some liquid at. I'll just push my, uh, little plastic down in here a little bit, just so that can kind of liquid is kind of touching everything. Fermentation to start, uh, probably within 24 to 36 hours. So we'll watch the, um, bubbler here and see how it does in 24 hours. I'll keep you posted. Okay. It's been exactly 24 hours here and you can see by the airlock that, uh, the carbon dioxide is coming out of here. So we're almost at fermentation. Uh, we're going to give it a stir today and see what it looks like. So if you look in here, you can see the bubbles. That's a good sign that the yeast is working. So basically you want to push down this bag each time you stir this. And we're going to do this every single day. Again, remember that this paddle has been sanitized. So here we are on day two. It's been over 24 hours, but less than 48. Uh, as you can see, the bubbler as suspected is going pretty crazy already. So again, between 24 to 36 hours, you should see some activity with your yeast. Day three. Still see we got some bubbling action going on as is suspected. Just going to give it a stir here, show you what it looks like. Okay. Here we are. Day four. You can see the bubbler is still going strong. Uh, let's open it up and give it a stir here. Okay. So here we are at day five. You can see it's still bubbling away pretty good. I think we probably have, uh, at least another day or so. Um, today is Saturday. I'm hoping by Monday, maybe it'll be done and we can start racking it next week to the secondary. Um, so let's give it a stir. Day six. You can see the, uh, airlock now is slower than normally has been in the last few days. So I believe this is probably going to be the last day. Uh, we're going to give it a stir and see what happens till tomorrow morning, but we're very close to the end of the process of the primary fermentation. So let's give it a stir. So here we are, day seven. We're still got a little bit of bubbling action going, uh, every 15 seconds or so it seems like maybe less. Um, so we're going to let it go another day, give it a stir here, and hopefully in the next day or so we'll be done with the primary fermentation. Um, so let's give it a stir. So here we are day eight. It is still bubbling a little bit. Um, we're very close to racking this wine. Want the bubbles to be about a minute apart and then you know, you're ready to go. So I'm going to give this one final stir and tomorrow, uh, we'll plan on racking this. Here we are on day 10 of, uh, the primary fermentation and believe it or not, I think we're ready. I've only seen a bubble coming every about a minute or so. And that's how you can kind of tell when it's ready. Uh, I'm going to take the lid off. We're going to float the hydrometer in there and get a reading and it should be pretty close down to the very top of it. And that's where you want it. And you'll know when that primary fermentation is done. So let's take a look and get a reading. So as you can see, it's not much foaming action going on here. So I'm going to drop the hydrometer in here. Uh, again, it's sanitized and you're probably not going to be able to see the reading, but I'll get a closeup picture of it. Um, you can see it's going way down there. Uh, so it looks like it's almost to the zero mark there. And that's exactly where we want it. So we know it's time to rack this wine. So we're getting ready to rack it over into our carboy and, uh, just show you a little bit of the setup I got here. We got the racking cane that's going to go from our bucket mead bucket and it's going to drain all the way down to our carboy, uh, down here. Uh, so obviously the carboy has to be lower for gravity to take place. So let me get it started here. And as we go, I'll kind of show you, uh, what I'm going to do with the bag inside. Hopefully I can start this with one hand so you can see it's going down to our carboy. You also want to make sure you got your tube kind of down into your liquid there because, uh, oxygen is your enemy in this process. So as soon as we get this carboy filled up, I'm not sure how close we're going to get, or we may actually have more and we'll just put that in a separate container. Uh, you can see it's a pretty purple color, which is beautiful for this mixed berry wine. So up here is what I'm going to do with this bag. You don't really want to force anything out of it. I'm just going to slowly lift it up a little bit. So the liquid kind of drains out. It's a little bit easier with two people, but, uh, you can do it with one. You can't see the bottom bucket here, but we're about three quarters full. So I'm just lifting this bag up, hopefully to drain it out a little bit as much as I can without forcing it out. I'll slowly tilt this bucket when I can. Probably have a good gallon left yet in the carboy. So I think you're going to have just about enough. You want to get the, uh, wine up as close to the nozzle with about an inch off of the top. Because again, oxygen is your enemy in this case. And when we put the airlock on there, we want to have about an inch below that cork. And I'll show you that here when we get there. That's about all she wrote. So one of the final steps you want to do is you want to get your airlock on the tube here. I already have the cork in there. Um, so we're just going to put the airlock in here. Uh, this is probably a little bit higher than I would like. We're going to see how it, what happens here in the next couple of days. If it cooks out a little bit, comes down over the edge, I'll take a little bit out, but I think it'll be fine. So I don't know if this camera is going to pick this up or not, but you can see here, uh, I've had it sitting out for about a 30 minutes. You can see it's already starting to settle. The yeast is going to the bottom. Um, so that's what you want. And hopefully we'll be racking this wine after about 30 days and we'll see what it looks like. So the next step on this is I'm going to put this down in a cool basement where there's no light and it's dark. And after about 30 days, I'll rack it. We're going to keep racking it every 30 days. I'll probably go through maybe three to four rackings before I actually finally bottle it. Uh, but you'll see, it's going to turn a crystal clear. So just a couple of quick tips for you. Make sure you use a mesh bag when you're using a fresh fruit because all that pulp gets into your wine. If you wouldn't have that, it would take you several rackings to get all that pulp out of there. This is just going to save you a lot of steps. Make sure you take your time with the hobby. It's fun. It's going to probably take about three to four months to finish this batch up and get it bottled. Also, as you're making your own wine, if you have any comments or questions, feel free to comment on this video and I'll be sure to respond to you. I know the questions will come up. You know, how do you do this? How do you do that? And I'll be glad to help you along in your hobby. So that's going to wrap it up for this first video. Please stay tuned for the second part of this wine making where I'll be teaching you how to rack the wine and bottle the wine and see what this product actually turns out. I think it's going to be a beautiful color. And in the second video, I'm going to show you one of my favorite things about wine making. Uh, so you don't want to miss that either. I'm going to taste this, see what it tastes like. And I can tell you it's going to be a great batch. It's already delicious.