Refined wine
The full name of craft wine is handmade wine. In recent ten years, craft wine has been very popular in western developed countries. It has become a fashion and hobby, an excellent drink for weddings and birthday parties, and the best gift for friends and relatives. Craft wine has many important technical details, which is different from the wine produced by the factory. Craft wine does not use any chemical additives, and absolutely does not use sulfur dioxide. In the whole brewing process, he emphasized the more important details that some specialized wineries could not do, highlighted the delicate technology and made it step by step. The craft wine did not pursue too much output, even starting from 1 bottle of wine, and the quality was the most important. The manpower and cost of handmade wine are more important than industrialization. Crafted wine is more integrated into the soul of the brewer, just like a noble and respected work of art, which embodies the respect and love of the brewer for wine and makes the homemade wine unique in taste and quality. The craft wine adopts special self-brewed wine equipment, and the wine liquid will not contact with the air, be oxidized and be polluted by harmful bacteria in the air during the whole brewing process, thus fundamentally ensuring the quality of the self-brewed wine and the hygienic standard during the brewing process.
The following is a simple case introduction of craft wine:
First, prepare brewing equipment.
First of all, special brewing barrels and wine cabinets should be prepared for fine wines (see figure 1). 1 The wine cabinet can be equipped with at most 16 brewing barrels. If more wine is brewed, we can equip more brewing cabinets or more brewing barrels as appropriate. The structure of brewing barrel is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 1. Prepare wine barrels and wine cabinets for brewing.
Figure 2.
Special brewing barrel for craft wine
The important technical detail of craft wine is to control the wine from contacting with air, because once the wine contacts with air, the wine will be polluted by various harmful bacteria in the air and the wine will be oxidized. Oxidized wine may not change in a short time, but with the increase of time, the quality and shelf life of wine will be seriously affected. In order to prevent wine from being oxidized and polluted in the process of brewing and preservation, the technical measures taken by wine production enterprises are to continuously add chemical additives such as sulfur dioxide into wine liquid. Sulfur dioxide is a chemical substance harmful to human body, and it is definitely not good to add sulfur dioxide to wine. However, because the current brewing equipment and technology used by wineries can't guarantee that the wine won't come into contact with air, they have to add sulfur dioxide to the wine during the brewing process. If sulfur dioxide is also added to homemade wine, such people must be out of their minds, because homemade wine is to obtain healthy and safe wine without any chemical additives. There are many folk brewing methods that do not use chemical additives, but because the wrong brewing container is used, the wine will always be in contact with the air during the brewing process, so it is difficult to ensure the quality of wine. In fact, as long as we can ensure that every detail of liquor in the brewing process is not in contact with air, we can effectively control the quality of homemade liquor and the hygiene standards in the brewing process.
Second, choose grapes.
Craft wine technology does not require too many varieties of grapes. Craft wine technology believes that almost all grapes can be used to make wine. There is no difference between good grapes and bad grapes, only you like the taste and style of wine made from that grape. Besides grapes, other fruits can also be used to make wine. Fruits that can make wine include blueberries, strawberries, lychees, and even mangoes, sugar cane, apples and pineapples.
When selecting grapes, in principle, grapes with high maturity should be selected. Grapes with high maturity also have high sugar content, which is beneficial to the primary fermentation of grapes. Remove rotten, cracked and immature grapes, clean the surface of grapes, do not use any chemical detergent, and there should be no residual water on the surface of grapes.
Third, the grapes are broken into barrels.
Squeeze out the grapes one by one and put them in the wine bottle. Grapes can be broken, but not too broken. Don't fill the barrel too full, just 80%, as shown in the figure (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Squeeze the grapes into the barrel one by one.
There is a problem that many friends who are beginners in homemade wine often mention. Do you want sugar in your homemade wine? How much sugar?
Grape wine-making is a biochemical change process, and its principle is that fructose and wine in grapes become alcohol and carbon dioxide under the action of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, alcohol dissolves in grape liquid and becomes wine, and carbon dioxide gas is discharged into the air. The rough calculation method of converting various sugars into alcohol is: in 1 liter of wine, every 17 gram of sugar can convert 1 degree of alcohol. If you want to brew wine with 10 degree or above, the raw materials of each liter of wine must contain more than170g of fructose and glucose. The sugar content of grapes is related to the variety and maturity of grapes, and the grapes with good varieties have high sugar content; The higher the maturity of grapes, the higher the sugar content. Usually, the sugar content of wine grapes is much higher than that of fresh grapes.
If grapes with low sugar content are used to make wine, the first fermentation of grapes (also called alcohol fermentation) is not easy to start. If the grapes are not fermented well, the wine during fermentation is easily attacked by other harmful bacteria, and the wine is easy to deteriorate. Therefore, it is necessary to add sugar to make wine with grapes with low sugar content. For beginners, you can add more sugar when you start brewing. The ratio of 3 kg of grapes plus 1 kg of sugar is actually not too much, because grapes with more sugar are easy to ferment and easily become wine. With the continuous increase of brewing experience, the amount of sugar added can be gradually reduced. After all, the added sugar is not as good as fructose and glucose of grapes, and too much sugar will also affect the aroma and taste of wine.
Fourthly, sealing, and performing primary fermentation.
Fill the water seal at the top of the brewing barrel with clear water, cover the water seal (see Figure 4), and enter the primary fermentation process of wine. After a few hours, fermentation can begin.
Figure 4. Cover the water seal and seal the water seal with water.
The earlier the primary fermentation (that is, alcohol fermentation) starts, the better. It is best to start fermentation within 1-2 hours after the self-brewed wine equipment is sealed, and it must start fermentation within 12 hours at the latest. If fermentation can't start after more than 12 hour, the quality of wine will be affected.
In order to facilitate the rapid fermentation of wine, special wine yeast and more sugar can be added before fermentation. However, if too much wine yeast is added, the wine will have a yeast flavor, and too much sugar will also affect the taste and aroma of the wine. Therefore, the practice of craft wine is to ferment 1 barrel of wine before each batch of brewing, and then start the subsequent fermentation of each barrel with this barrel of wine as the primer. In this way, the wine fermented in the later stage has a better taste because it does not use artificial yeast.
The specific method is: first ferment 1 barrel of wine, this barrel of wine should add a little more Saccharomyces cerevisiae and sugar, and the fermentation will start soon. After 48 hours, the first barrel of wine has been fermented violently, and then two barrels of wine are fermented with the liquor of this barrel of wine as the primer, and then two barrels of wine are fermented every 48 hours with the liquor produced by the previous fermentation as the primer (see Figure 5). In this way, the brewing work will begin one after another, and the daily brewing should be recorded.
Figure 5. Brewing barrels that began to ferment one after another.
Five, turn the barrel
After a few days, the grapes in each wine barrel slowly and naturally turned into wine. In Figure 6, the lower part of the bottle is wine.
Figure 6. After a few days, the grapes in the barrel naturally became wine.
Crafted wine adopts skin fermentation technology. In order to make the wine ferment better and make the nutrients in grape skins better integrated into the wine, it is a unique technology to turn the barrel 1 ~ 2 times every 24 hours in a fermentation process. Bucket turning is to turn the special brewing container used in the above picture 180 degrees (i.e. upside down), and turn the brewing barrel several times at a time, so that the wine in the container can be better mixed with grape skins. The advantage of turning barrels is that grape skins can be fully mixed with wine, and wine will not come into contact with air.
Six, pour the bucket
After the first fermentation, the wine should be emptied in time (or the peel and residue should be separated) about 10 ~ 15 days. Inverted barrel means that the brewed liquor naturally flows into another empty barrel from the fermentation barrel, and the wine continues to undergo secondary fermentation in the new barrel. Figure 7 shows the wine with the barrel inverted.
Figure 7. Fermented wine should be emptied in time.
Seventh, secondary fermentation
After the first fermentation, the peel and residue are separated in time, and then the brewed wine liquid is put into another clean empty barrel, and the wine will be fermented for the second time in a new barrel. Secondary fermentation, also known as malic acid-lactic acid fermentation, is to gradually convert malic acid in wine into lactic acid. The length of this process is controlled by the brewer according to the situation, and it usually takes 1- 18 months.
Because secondary fermentation has very strict requirements on the brewing environment, the containers used for secondary fermentation and the temperature control of the fermentation environment, secondary fermentation is a work with high requirements on brewing technology. Otherwise, the secondary fermented wine will not only fail to achieve the expected effect, but will deteriorate with time.
Figure 8. Store the secondary fermented wine in the upper part of the grid.
After secondary fermentation, the wine must be aged in full barrels, and more secondary fermentation contents will be announced in the provision stage of craft wine technology.
In this way, the self-brewed wine is gradually transformed into secondary fermentation, and 1 wine cabinet is filled. See fig. 9
Figure 9. The wine brewed by primary fermentation is gradually transformed into secondary fermentation.
Eight. others
Pour the remaining grape skins and seeds into the fermentation barrel, and continue to brew the next batch of wine after cleaning. Besides grapes, there are many fruits that can be brewed by fine brewing techniques, from plums to strawberries, lychees, pineapples and even mangoes, sugar cane, apples and oranges.
Carefully crafted wine, each grape is carefully selected without using any chemical additives. The liquor does not contact with air during the whole brewing process, and it is the safest and healthiest pure natural health drink.
Photo 10. If you drink it yourself, you don't need to bottle it separately, just take it out of the tap.
Photo 1 1. If it's for friends, it looks better in a bottle.
Carefully crafted wine, every grape has been carefully selected, and every detail of winemaking can stand the test. Do not use any chemical additives, do not pursue output, and ensure that every bottle is good wine. Craft wine is more integrated into the soul of the brewer, just like a noble and respected work of art, which embodies the respect and love of the brewer and makes the craft wine unique in taste and quality.
Craft wine needs repeated practice, study, summary and accumulation of experience in order to improve the level of craft wine. You can also get more information about homemade wine through the e-mail address of hunter xu53 @163.com. You can also send photos or videos of your brewing process to the above-mentioned e-mail, and we will answer all kinds of questions you encounter in the brewing process in real time.