By this time you’ve racked your wine several times from one carboy to another. The airlock is quiet as fermentation has stopped. You notice that after the last racking, there has been no more sediment deposited on the bottom of the carboy, and using a wine thief, a specially formed glass tube for drawing samples of wine; you fill half a wine glass with your labor of love to check it for clarity and flavor. If you’re satisfied with the wine you can either leave it in the carboy for further aging, (assuming you don’t need the jug for additional batches of wine), transfer it to another container such as a small barrel, or in most cases you’ll choose to bottle.
A supply of bottles should be no problem if you’ve been saving them as you drink. Of course, your bottles will need to be cleaned. You can use a pressure washer type attachment on your faucet, a scrubber that attaches to a driver/drill, or the good old fashioned hand bottle brush. A bottle tree, a rack to hold bottles while draining; is a useful purchase if you’re cleaning lots of bottles. Bottles must be sterilized before filling using a device that squirts a sulfite solution into the bottles, or you can just line them up in the sink and pour boiling water over them. Once bottles are clean, dry and sterile they’re ready to be filled. The simplest method uses the same siphoning system you used to rack your wine; fill to the desired level and stop the flow. There are filling devices you can use that attach to your siphon hose and automatically stop the flow when the bottle is full, as well as gravity feed and electric bottle fillers for filling large quantities.
Filled bottles then need to be sealed. I use corks exclusively for closing my bottles and have yet to have a bottle spoil. To seat corks you have several options. Plunger type corkers are OK for small quantities. Single- and double-armed lever corkers are easier and faster to use, although the double-armed type takes a little practice. If you’re going to make more than a couple of cases a year though, a floor or bench corker is a worthwhile investment; much faster and more consistent.
Now we’ve covered the basics of equipment for the home winemaker. Join me for the next series of posts as we get into the actual winemaking process. I’ve got 50 lbs of raspberries to turn into wine!
Front to Rear: Wine thief, bottle brushes, double-armed lever corker, bottle sanitizer, bottle tree, floor corker, Pippin.

What recent advancements allow for a better home winemaking experience?

In spite of the common belief, winemaking is a very simple process that can be done anywhere with the most ordinary ingredients. This art has come to us, the modern man, though ages and ages of wisdom and experience. In ancient times, winemaking was simple, fast and the result was exceptional. In modern days, there are a lot of ways to make wine, some simple on the lines our ancestors, and some as complicated as you would like them.
Thankfully, homemade wines have become a fad the world over and with the pleasure of making wine at home, the demand for better ingredients, automation and fast maturity of the wine have grown by leaps and bounds.
The modernization has not, as expected, improved in any way the process of wine making. You can still the best wines in the traditional way at home, with the ingredients that you can pick from the shelf of your kitchen. However, the hi-tech’s contribution has been to fast forward the maturity time of the wine. This development has made it possible for people to have their wine, almost immediately after it has been bottled and dispatched to the market. Many love this development because the patience of a human being is not the same today, that had been some hundred years ago.
The second great achievement and gift of science-technology to the making of wine is that the grapes quality has become much better, and much more uniform in taste. Hence, the wine’s flavor is fast to develop and better to taste. What the modern could not do, was to improve in any way the art of wine making. The basic wine making art remains the same.
extract the pulp of the grapes by soaking and then crushing and pressing
add your helping ingredients, i.e. yeast, sugar, etc and leave for fermentation for an initial period of about one week
After 7-10 days take the liquid and strain it of the grape skins and other ingredients also allow the liquid to ferment further, while being careful to maintain the temperature at 60-65 degrees Fahrenheit.
Wait till the fermentation totally stops (you will know when the bubbling of the liquid ceases completely)
Strain the liquid again through very fine cheese cotton cloth and let it ferment again – this time for the secondary fermentation. You can repeat this step once or twice at intervals of one or two months
Bottle the resulting liquid and cork them tightly. The bottles will need to be left standing for about five days, after which these should be stored at an angle at 55F for 6-24 months. For white wines, aging should not exceed 12 months.
Sample the wine; if you find it matured, enjoy it. If not, let it age for about six months to one year more.
Numerous reasons to make your own wine at home:
•A relaxing hobby
•Low cost - $3.00 or less per bottle as opposed to $10, $15, $20
•Customizable, if you prefer something a little less dry, it’s your choice
•Hundreds of wine types available•Great gift ideas•Satisfaction and a little prestige

STUDYING HOW TO MAKE WINE

For those who are interested in making homemade wine, there are a number of ways to do so. You can hop off to the Internet and learn about recipes for the different types of wines which make use of different fruits in other to get their particular base. After this then you should select the particular wine that you want to make and get a recipe so you can begin. Alternatively you can easily purchase books, videos or DVDs which will teach you how wine is made. At the library you can also spend a huge amount of hours taking stock of the library books and making notes until you have heard all the things that are possible about the winemaking procedure. You can also talk to people who have been making wine successfully for a long time and this would usually be in the case where you have tasted some wonderful wine that they made and you want this experience for yourself. If you find yourself with enough time on your hands, you can also opt for winemaking classes at a local institution or one which offers its courses online.
The art of winemaking has become very popular and so much so that courses at the university which offer to teach people about winemaking exist. Other things that can be discovered here are the types of grapes which are used to make certain types of wine and which types of these grapes you should grow. These courses are things you take all year round but lighter courses which will still earn you credits. Other more complete courses also exist where you will learn everything from wine growth, chemical reactions to the financial facts necessary to maintain a wine business. These courses may even teach about the comparisons between large wineries and smaller ones and they also give you the tax advantages and accounting strategies which are necessary for the running of any business.
People who want to learn how to make wine just for themselves also have courses which cater to them. Not only can you find classes which will teach you how to make wine, but if your enroll you will have at least a minimum of sixty bottles of wine just to prove that you have attended the course. These courses are so simple and they cost less than a hundred dollars but you should probably factor in an extra fifty, in order to account for associated costs such as ingredients, bottles and some other stuff which may be needed. Some institutions offering these courses will even permit you to utilize their cellar space as a wine cellar in order to allow your wine ferment more conveniently. Encouragement and assistance will also be provided to enable you design a label for your foray into the world of winemaking.
Another thing that these classes will teach other than making grape wine is the art of making fruit wine. While some of these classes will be at university level, not all will be, most will be provided by community colleges and community centers. If you aren’t up for joining any of these efforts however, you can simply stay at home instead of taking a winemaking class. You also have the options of distance learning and purchasing your own winemaking kits

Vineyards On the Move
By Eric Pape/Newsweek Web Exclusive

It sounds like a vintner's nightmare: Sharp shifts in temperature help trigger potent off-season rains that bloat grapes with unwanted moisture. Then an overpowering heat wave withers vines and shrivels grapes. Desperate winemakers advance the harvest by as much as a month to save what they can. This is no vineyard horror film; it's a description of some of the 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon and merlot harvests in parts of southern and western France.
And boy, was it good. In a decade that keeps breaking records for heat, we're already sipping climate-changed wines. Hot years like 2000 and 2006 produced some stellar, rich, full-bodied and mature Bordeaux, but the 2003 heat-wave harvest was the best in memory—at least until the hot harvest of 2005. Global-warming cru is more flavorful, fruitier, less acidic and higher in alcohol content than the average-temperature stuff, a near-perfect fit for today's wine drinkers. And these hot wines tend to come mature, so even a big Bordeaux no longer needs to ripen in the cellar for a decade.
For the wine industry, the biggest advantage of global warming is that it's expanding the world's prime grape-growing areas. Hotter, dryer weather means that even volatile wine regions like Burgundy—with great soil but often terrible weather—are flourishing more consistently. Growers in the Mosel Valley, who in the 1980s had to add sugar and water to their wine to counter its acidity, now produce low-acid wines with plenty of alcohol. Respectable pinot noirs, long a staple in California, are regularly harvested in Oregon and even Washington state now.
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And if forecasts are correct, the coming decades could bring even greater gains. Scientists estimate that every increase in temperature of one degree Celsius drives wine regions north by 180 to 200 kilometers. The Champagne region is France's traditional good-wine limit in the north, while northern Germany long grew grapes that only a local could love. Now even northern Rieslings are winning fans, winemakers are harvesting in parts of the U.K. and some see potential in developing Belgian vineyards. "If the climate crosses a certain threshold," says winemaking consultant Michel Rolland, "we could see the inconceivable become foreseeable."
Visionaries anticipate Alsatian and German winemakers shifting away from cold-weather Rieslings, pinot gris and pinot noirs toward Mediterranean whites and sunnier merlots. By the latter half of the century, areas in southern Britain may have weather similar to France's Champagne region today. A glass of Sparkling Kent may sound absurd today, but who's to say it will in 50 years?
To thrive in the long run, winemakers will have to be nimble, innovative and, above all, flexible. Portugal and Spain could see temperatures increase by as much as five degrees, potentially driving high-quality wine from the Iberian Peninsula altogether. A recent Italian analysis suggested that rising heat could ruin fine Tuscan wines. And by the year 2100, Normandy and Brittany may enjoy weather found in southern France today. But, says Rolland, "nature never changes from one day to the next, so this usually allows us to adapt."