10 Essential Winemaking Tips I Wish I Knew as a Beginner

Here's a couple of tips for making wine. This is specifically for the complete beginner. These are some things that I wish I would have known when I got started. So tip number one I'd say start with a kit before you go to making fruit wines. I did not do that and I really wish I would have started with a kit. It gives you the fundamentals, the basics, it kind of just lets you know what to get what to do to get started. Now these are both different. This one is a kit wine and this one is a fruit wine that I've made with fresh apples and plums just out of the backyard. They both turned out really well but it was much harder to get here than it was to just follow the instructions on the kit. Now for tip number two I'd say you always want to take and lift your carboy or your primary the day before you plan on siphoning it. Just put it on a ledge or on a towel or something to kind of prep it, get it ready for when you want to siphon it. Any loose sediment or stuff floating around, whatever debris, it's going to have a chance to settle back down to the bottom so you're not going to pick it up and put it into your next siphon stage. I recommend getting a carboy cleaning brush, a long one like this, that you can bend and make it whatever shape you need it to be to clean out your carboys. This one was totally straight when I bought it and here's kind of the way or the shape that I bent it to and this will let you get both the top of the carboy, you can go all the way around and get that top inner lip and the tapered neck, and it'll also let you put the thing down into the carboy and get the sides. So there might be a better bend, might be a better way of doing this but this worked for me by bending it like this to get the whole carboy clean. Otherwise I really struggled at the beginning to get those things cleaned right up. Now I do have a different video on the channel for the next tip and that is mixing the bentonite. I really wish somebody would have showed me how to mix this stuff properly when I started. I'll leave a card up at the top that'll kind of help you guys get going with that. But this stuff is clay and it's clumpy and whatever. I found it difficult to mix just using a mason jar. You can get this stuff mixed up and then kind of do it like an hour before you plan on mixing your kit or give it an hour to kind of just follow that process that I show you how to do. Then this stuff will actually pour nice and it'll make that whole mixing thing a whole heck of a lot easier. Here is a another product I wish I would have found a whole heck of a lot sooner and no I'm not endorsed by them although it'd be really nice if they did. I'll leave a link to all this stuff down below so you guys can pick it up off of Amazon. But anyway, Starsan. There's probably a whole heck of a lot of different sanitizers out there. This is just way better than the Metabisulfate or whatever one it is. I think I've got a video about that anyway. There'll be a card up here if there is on the channel. But this stuff doesn't stink. It just smells like regular dish soap. The best part about this, you don't have to rinse it. So when you use it as directed, after your stuff is washed, give it a rinse with this. Let the bubbles kind of just subside for maybe five minutes or so and then give her. Put it in the carboy or whatever. It does a great job of cleaning or sanitizing and you don't have to rinse after. There is like one downside to this thing. If you do spill it on the floor and wipe it up, it kind of does give the floor like a weird tack. But I mean that would be my bad for spilling this stuff. But that would be the only negative thing I've found at all about using Starsan. So I'm quite pleased with this. It's a million times better than the other sanitizer I tried. So another tip I'd say or something to learn probably for me is patience. Both in clearing and when it comes to drinking wines. I'm slowly working on it. I'm getting better but yeah I struggle with it. This wine here is a homemade wine. That is a mango, pineapple, and nectarine I think. I am struggling getting that wine to clear and from all my research on forums people are just telling me wait, be patient, it'll clear. It is slowly getting clear. Yes I've tried bentonite in this one and for whatever reason I think it's a pectin haze going on. And when I do figure out what's going to work to clear this thing, whether it's time or whatever, I will post back on the channel. But yeah be patient with it. Don't just chuck it out. Give it time. There's very little headspace on this carboy so there's no harm in just leaving it alone. The other part of patience and this one I learned with the first Moscato kit that I made. It was really really good right out of bottling. So we enjoyed bottles with ourselves for supper, dinner, or if we had friends down. Really proud of the first wine that we made. So there's three bottles left of this wine at this point in time that is aging. But here's the kicker. About every week or two if you open it up now it's getting really like a lot better. So most of the wine we drank before was properly aged or aged at all. We're leaving the last three till at least three months before we even open up another bottle. But yeah patience is a virtue. If you're making wine kits kind of do what I did I think with just get a bunch of kits going so you can get stuff aging because you'll really want to drink this stuff. And if you don't make enough you'll drink it before it's aged and before it's developed to be the best wine that it can be. Try to find used stuff. If you go looking online you can probably find stuff on Kijiji, Virage Sale, whatever your app is of choice for like used bottles. And it'll save you quite a bit of money initially because bottles is probably going to be your biggest cost in the beginning to get kind of set up. And there's lots of people that seem to be selling used bottles. And if you're drinking wine keep your bottles, pull the labels off, take the tabs off the top and just wash them and reuse them. The last thing I will share with you is document. This is not maybe as applicable if you're making kit wines but it's still beneficial because at a glance you can kind of easily see the age of the wines that you've got bottled or kind of where they are in their winemaking process. This is a spreadsheet I'm working on for my wine list and it gives me a bottle date, alcohol percentage and the age of the wine. This is also helping me kind of refrain from trying those wines before they're properly aged. And the plus side of doing this as well is if you have something that works out really well you've essentially made yourself a recipe that hopefully you can repeat. On the actual tabs on this spreadsheet that I'm working on it does a couple of calculations so I don't have to manually do this every time as well. So it's saving me some time there. If you guys are interested in a link to the spreadsheet when it is I'll say more developed and maybe better set up I'd be happy to share. Let me know in the comments below if you'd like to be able to use something like this as well. Then I'll spend some time in kind of tweaking this thing making it a little bit better. That's all I've got for my beginner tips. I hope I didn't leave anything out. Who knows I'll be editing this thing and uploading it and all of a sudden I'll realize shoot I missed a whole ton. If you do have your own tips to share leave them in the comments down below for both myself and other people that are watching the video.