Wine Making

I want to try this approach to get started - it looks cheap and it's supposed to produce a pretty good wine.

http://www.michiganwines.com/buy-sell-grapes

http://www.klinekrestcertifiedorganicproduce.com/KlineKrestCertifiedOrganicSmallFruits.htm

http://www.winemakingtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=41825

Results

The wine is good, a tiny bit more sour than I'd like. I back-sweetened just a little. My original numbers were quite a bit off. I ended up needing 6 bottles of juice for 5 gallons. It made 21 bottles, but I also spilled a lot in the process (and drank a bit at various stages). I think 5 gallons should make 24 bottles.

UPDATE: After the wine sat for a few weeks, the sour mellowed out quite a bit. It's pretty good now, on par with a cheap bottle.

Still, it was about $30 for the juice, negligible for the rest; $1.50 / bottle is pretty good. I'm looking at wine kits that run ~$70, that will be about $2.30 / bottle.

Kits

These look good

• http://www.northernbrewer.com/master-vintner-winemakers-reserve-cabernet-sauvignon
• http://www.northernbrewer.com/master-vintner-winemakers-reserve-malbec

Bentonite Clay

• 2 t clay
• 1/2 C boiling water

Stir and let sit at least 4 hours

Mix 2T/gal into the wine and mix the wine every hour for a few hours. Be sure to have used a campden tablet to stop fermentation. This is also a good point to degas if you're doing that by hand.

Nylon Bag

The best use of the nylon bag for filtering is not to fill it up an let it drain, but only fill it about 10% and then slosh the liquid around inside. This is easier and prevents it from clogging. About every 3 cycles the bag needs to be flipped inside out and cleaned.

Timing

Bottling

Cleaning 30 bottles took about 45, but there was a lot of labels, can do it in less than 30 if there are no labels. Bottling and corking took about 20 minutes each.