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Part 2 of Mike attempting to make Cabernet Sauvignon with a home winemaking kit. Step-by-step process from the sterilizing of the equipment to the pitching of the yeast. More info at SuppleWine.com.
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You're watching Screw It on SuppleWine. I'm your host, Mike Supple, and this is part 2 of my experiment with home wine making.

I've got my sanitizer packet. [Sanitizing all of the equipment is a very important first step to ensure that no foreign substances or bacteria end up ruining the wine.]

Got a giant bag of concentrated grape juice here - it's Cabernet Sauvignon. Now I try to do this without spilling grape juice all over myself and the kitchen. Just open up your grape juice and pour it into the fermentation bucket. It pours thick and syrupy, almost like molasses.

There's still a lot of good juice that remains in the bag, so the next step - you don't want to waste stuff - is to fill this with some hot water, rinse it all around and dump it into the bucket. My tap water has smells and flavors to it that I don't want affecting my wine, so I bought jugs of distilled water. Distilled water should have no flavors or aromas. Really I just want to taste the wine. I don't want to taste the crappy iron or whatever else is in my tap water.

[Microwaves water, pours it into concentrate bag, mixes it around and dumps it into the bucket.]

Now I just fill it the bucket the rest of the way with water to the six gallon mark. Normal wineries don't add water to the grape juice - but this was concentrated grape juice that had already been dehydrated. That way it is easier to handle and ship. Shipping around a six gallon jug would be rather unwieldy. Now we're just adding the water back that they dehydrated out of it to make it regular juice.

Now I need to stir if for a couple of minutes to make sure the water and concentrated juice are all mixed in evenly. But more importantly you want to get a lot of oxygen into the liquid. The yeast that turns the sugar into alcohol feeds on oxygen, so it's important to make sure that there is air in there so the yeast can stay alive and turn your juice into wine.

I took a little bit of the juice out just because I'm curious. If it tastes like crap when you start it's probably not going to be any good when you finish. Well, it tastes like grape juice. It's incredibly sweet - which is good because I want to have a nice, bold alcohol wine - it's supposed to be a big Cabernet. It doesn't really taste like a whole lot else besides grape juice, but it's very good and very concentrated. Fingers crossed!

Next I want to get the specific gravity of the juice. You get specific gravity with a hydrometer. It tells you essentially what the ratio of sugar to water is. Once it has fermented you measure the specific gravity again and you can get a good estimate of how much sugar was converted to alcohol, and thus get an approximate alcohol content of the wine. It looks like it's 1.096.

Something important to note is the temperature correction. If you look at the bucket, our juice is 70 degrees. For 70 degrees you add one (thousandth) to the specific gravity number, so instead of 1.096, our starting gravity is 1.097. The starting gravity for a dry wine should be between 1.085 and 1.100, so we're right on target.

The next step is to add the oak. Once the oak is in the juice it's time to stir again to make sure I have even concentration of juice, oak, bubbles, etc. Some big wineries use oak chips to get oak flavor instead of using barrels. The major reason is because it is a lot less expensive. New oak barrels can cost well over $1000.00 whereas this bag of oak chips is just a couple of bucks. Of course you'd need more oak chips for a giant winery, but it's still significantly less expensive than oak barrels.

The final step for today is adding the yeast which starts the process of turning the sugar into alcohol, and covering the bucket.

A very important part of this: when the yeast is turning the sugar into alcohol it creates carbon dioxide. If I just slammed a regular lid on my bucket it would blow up and create a mess everywhere. There is a hole in my lid to let the air out. But you also want to make sure that other things can't get in the bucket, so we use a lid lock. This lets the CO2 out without letting any foreign substances in.