When you enter the world of home wine making, there are no limits as to the different types of wines you can make. You are free to combine ingredients, add flavors, use locally grown fresh fruit, or berries you grow in your own home garden. You can allow your personal tastes to dictate the dryness or sweetness of your wine, or determine whether you will use fresh fruit or go with commercially available wine ingredient kits for a more traditional wine.
Wine Making Kits and Wine Making Supplies
A wine making kit is a great way to start in the art of home wine making if you are a beginner, because it will introduce you to all the basics of wine making and provide you with the essential wine making supplies and ingredients you need to get started. Once you’re familiar with the process, you may want to make wine with whatever fresh fruits are available at different times of the year.
You will be able to use all of the equipment you got when you purchased any of the different wine kits available on homebrewing.org, and purchase whatever additional supplies you may need to use when making fruit wines. When making fruit wines, the added equipment you need will require additional space, so be sure you understand this before deciding to make fruit wines.
Wine Grape Ingredient Kits
Wine grape ingredient kits allow you to choose from wine grape varieties that come from all over the world. These grape varieties will allow you to make wines from the same grape varieties as the wines you’d typically purchase from wine retailers everywhere. These concentrates give you the ability to make wine from the same grapes that are used to make your favorite European, Californian, or other types of wines that are made elsewhere in the United States or other parts of the world.
The huge range of grape concentrates that are available, and the ease with which you can get them, and the obvious difficulty you’d have in getting comparable fresh grapes means that grape concentrates are probably the best option when it comes to making traditional wines from wine grapes.
Using Fresh Fruit to Make Wine
There is a huge variety of different types of fresh fruit you can use to make your own wine, and it isn’t more difficult to make fruit wine than it is to make wine with grape concentrate. Always make sure you are choosing fruits that are in season at the peak of their ripeness. Consider using strawberries or rhubarb in spring, blueberries, blackberries, apricots, peaches, nectarines or plums in summer, and apples in fall.
When you make wine from fresh fruit, you will have to test the acidity and amount of sugar in your liquid and make adjustments accordingly. You will also need to find out exactly how much fruit you need to use to make a gallon of wine. Home wine making recipes will instruct you as you go through each of the steps in the fruit wine making process.
The decision as to whether to use fresh fruit or wine concentrate is an entirely individual one. When you’re making your own wine you can add anything you want to it to alter the taste. You may want to add dried berries, herbs, or flowers to a grape wine to enhance its flavor, or you may want to use fresh berries to make a sweeter wine. If you are going to use fresh fruit, consider purchasing it from farmers markets because you’ll know that you’re getting it at the peak of freshness and ripeness. Enjoy this fun experience, and invite your family and friends over to savor the taste of your newest creations.
