🍇 How to Make the Best Homemade Red Wine from Grapes #winemaking

All right guys, it is harvest day. We are out at a vineyard out in Temecula, California. Today we are harvesting Zinfandel. Zinfandel is one of my favorite grapes, man. If you're a Californian man, you need to drink Zinfandel. Not white Zinfandel, real Zinfandel, man. So tell you what, let's go pick some grapes. Let's get making some more wine. All right, we are done picking. Dude, I've got about 200 pounds of Zen picked here. Oh man, dude, these grapes look so good. I mean, look at, look at these clusters, man. These things look awesome. Dude, look at these things. This is, dude, I mean, these things, these things are so juicy. They're like falling off the stem, man. Oh, dude, these things. Zen, baby, Zen. All right, tell you what, let's get home. Let's start crushing some Zen. So the idea is we've got 200 pounds of grapes. We're going to turn them into wine. So the first thing you got to do is we're going to crush them. So I got a crusher right here. I'll put a link in the description to the one that I'm using. So we're going to crush the grapes, break them up a little bit, try to get the stems out. Then I'm going to put them in this food grade container right here. And then we are going to add some yeast and we are going to ferment it, turn the sugars into alcohol, start making some wine. So let's get crushing, man. We got 200 pounds of grapes to crush. Okay, it is pressing day. Tell you what, take a look here. I did a measurement on my hydrometer of my alcohol level with my Zinfandel. So here's my hydrometer reading. You can see we're at one or under. If you haven't used a hydrometer before, basically what this does is it measures the density. So as the sugar is converted to alcohol, the density will decrease and this hydrometer will sink down lower. The thing is, if you look here, you can see it's got all the scales. And really what we're looking for is something about one or under. That suggests that fermentation is complete. So you see, we are ready to press, man. We are ready to press. So I'm going to show you what the plan is. So I'll go over here, tell you that here's what I use to do my fermentation in. This is a 55 gallon drum, food grade quality. One thing that I do, let's see if I can get a good picture of it, is I put it on a cart dolly, right? So the idea is I could roll this thing wherever I want because if it's got like 30 gallons in it, man, it gets pretty heavy. So I basically just roll it around wherever I need it, which means I could roll it next to my press. So I'm going to press here. I'm probably going to press into these five gallon buckets, right? So I think actually what I'm first going to do is I'm going to take the top layer of the grapes off, throw it in one of these buckets. I'll do that kind of last. Get the liquid, the free run, which is the first part going through, put it in my press, right? So I'll give it all in there, press. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put it in another container. I'm going to use my secondary container. So let me show you that. So I'm going to come over here. My wife's very understanding. So over here, I have set up, if you've seen my Cabernet video, this is a secondary container. This is 100 liters. So it holds 25 gallons basically. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put it all in here. We're going to let it sit there for a day or two. Let the leaves settle, drain off the top, and then we're going to do secondary fermentation of that. Then ultimately, we're going to put it in oak barrels. So I tell you what, let's get pressing. Okay. So here's our haul from 200 pounds of Zinfandel grapes. Looks like we've got about 13, 14 gallons or so. So now we're going to put this over in our secondary tank, let it settle for a day, and then we'll start secondary fermentation. So again, we picked the grapes, we crushed them, we fermented them with yeast. That took about a little over a week. We just crushed them. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put them in, this is my secondary container. This is, again, this is a 100 liter tank. So it holds about 26 gallons or so. It also has an adjustable top so I can vary the depth. So the idea is you don't want a lot of head space above your wine. So this is a Marchisio tank. It works out really well. I'll put a link in the description if you're interested in one of these tanks. It works out really well, and it's got a drain plug at the bottom, which actually is really nice. Very, very convenient. Okay, so let's get the wine in the tank. Man, my wife is going to be pissed if I spill this everywhere. One thing is, make sure your plug is closed so it doesn't spill out all over the floor. Looks good so far. So you can see my tank is over half full. It's about, I don't know, about up to here so a little over halfway. So yeah, we got about 15 gallons. It's a about a 25 gallon tank or so. All right, I am not in trouble. I did not spill a drop all over the fancy patio. So again, you can see I got about, I don't know, 15 gallons or so. And again, it's about a 25 gallon tank. Dude, this tank is awesome. It's a Marchisio. Again, I'll put a link in the description because man, I love this tank. This is a great tank. The cool thing is if you are between like, you know, if you're doing carboys, you're doing five gallon carboys, right? What do you do if you get like 12 gallons, right? Or 13 gallons and you have to split into smaller ones. This thing, you just kind of lower the top down to the right level and you're good to go. So the next step is what I need to do is, since there's still some sediment in there, right? And that's called the gross leaves. The gross leaves will settle to the bottom. Then you can see I've got a plug down there. I will drain it off the top, drain the top off the gross leaves. Then I'll put it back in and we'll do a secondary fermentation, malolactic fermentation. But so the next thing I need to do is I just need to get my top on there and then we'll be good. So what I, I have an adjustable top. The idea is it's got, you know, it's whatever, it's got a top and then it's got almost kind of like a inner tube around the side. So you just kind of pump it up until it seals to the bottom. So you bring it down as low as you can and then just seal it. I lowered my top down there. It's got kind of an inflatable, you can see it's got an inflatable tube along the end. So then what you do is just kind of layer, lower it down using this string and just kind of hold it there a little bit. Then you use this pump, right? So it's got a pump. So that pump will pump air into this tube. So it just expands the diameter a little bit, expands it up against the side of the fermenter. Okay, next step is we just let it sit for like a day or two. The, the gross leaves, which are all the sediment, all that stuff is going to flow down to the bottom. Then I'm going to pull the top off and then we're going to put it back in and then we are going to start malolactic fermentation. All right, we're back. This is a couple mornings later, I think about three days ago or so. So what we're going to do is we are going to drain the wine, the wine off the gross leaves, so that everything, the gunk that's settled down to the bottom. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drain it into a couple of carboys. You can see I've only got two, that's 10 gallons. We had about 15 gallons in there, but the thing is I, I'm actually going to a event in a couple of weeks and someone wanted me to bring some wine. So we're going to see how it goes. We're going to do a little nouveau press, so I actually put some in a wood barrel already, so I'm going to let you know how that one is. It should be okay, not going to be as great as it's done, but some of my friends caught wind that I did a fresh press and they wanted me to bring some wine. So we're going to do the oak barrel and I'll fill in, I'll let you know how it is. So yeah, so what we're going to do is we're going to drain off the gross leaves. We're going to put the wine back in after we clean the gunk out of the bottom of the tank. And then what we're going to do is malolactic fermentation. So if you're not familiar with malolactic fermentation, malolactic fermentation will convert malolactic acid to lactic acid. So it's sort of that tart taste. We're going to get rid of that. It's going to be a more smoothing lactic acid taste. So it's going to be a little bit better wine. So all right, man, let's get going. This is again, this is my Marchisio tank. The nice thing is it's got a drain plug at the bottom. So I'm just going to drain it into some water bottles, wash it out, put it back in. So this is what it looks like inside here. So here you can see you got the sludge at the bottom, right? And that's all like the grape skins and seeds and stuff that kind of made it through the press. So that's called the gross leaves. So now the thing is I got to clean this out. So I'll spray this out and I'll put the wine back in. Then we're going to do malolactic acid fermentation. The thing is if I put my malolactic bacteria into here before, you know, with the gross leaves, I think it'll just kind of crash, it'll crash the bacteria out of solution and drag it down with the leaves. So you want to get these gross leaves off. There's still some I'm sure in the containers, but that's okay as long as it's just light. So I'm going to wash this out and put the wine back in and we'll start malolactic acid fermentation. Tank is clean, put the wine back in. Now I'm going to put in the malolactic fermentation bacteria. So malolactic fermentation, as the name sounds, malolactic fermentation changes malic acid to lactic acid. Malic acid is the one that gives you that tart taste, right? And lactic acid is a lot more smoother. So this will convert it. Basically you get these things at the home brew stores. This one, you can get these vials or test tube looking things. Basically one test tube is designed to treat five gallons. So since we've got, I don't know what, seven gallons in there, I'm probably just going to throw one in there. You know what? Maybe we'll do two just to push it through a little farther. I do not have, you can get things like the extra food, right? So food for them to get them to grow more, but I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to throw them in there and see how it goes. All right, let's inoculate the culture with our malolactic acid fermentation bacteria, which is called malolactic culture. Here we go. We got the bacteria in there. We got the top back on. And so now we're going to let it go for about a month or so. It's going to convert the malic acid to lactic acid. Then what we'll do is we're going to put it in some barrels to age it. And at that point, we're going to put in some sulfites, but check this out. Have you seen my video on Cabernet? Dude, I made Cabernet Sauvignon also. So check out this video of my cab grapes. And with that, I'll see you in the next video.