People have been making white wine for centuries, and there’s no mystery to the way it is done. You can make the wine with grapes, with grape juice or with grape concentrate. Here are ten tips to ensure that your first attempts at White Wine making using grapes will be a success.

1. To make white wine use green grapes that are intended for wine making. You won’t have the same success with table grapes.

2. Before you start making white wine, make sure you have all the equipment and ingredients required. Proper planning is essential for success. It’s the same as pickling and preserving food. If your equipment isn’t properly sanitized, unhealthy bacteria will start to grow and pollute the food or wine.

3. Make sure your equipment is completely clean and sterile before you start the winemaking process. This applies to everything from the containers you use for fermentation, to the bottles you use for bottling once the wine is ready.

4. Choose a recipe that specifies a particular type of grape to avoid having to experiment with sugar quantities.

5. Only use top quality wine yeast for wine making. The most common type is produced from the Saccharomyces cerevisae yeast species. While varieties of Saccharomyces cerevisae yeast are also used for brewing beer and making bread, completely different yeast products are used.

6. Pressing bunches or clusters of grapes still on their stems can create a much more delicate flavor that has a more fruity taste and smell, largely because of the tannin content of the stems. The stems are then removed after pressing, before fermentation begins.

7. Even though you don’t have to de-stem the green grapes used to make white wine (see point 6), the wine will have more body if you do. So it’s a toss-up between the two approaches.

8. When pressing and juicing the grapes, minimize contact with the air otherwise the juice will oxidize and its color will be affected.

9. Rack the wine at least twice by siphoning into a clean fermentation container. This will get rid of the sediment (called lees) from the bottom and clarify the wine.

10. When you bottle your white wine, siphon it into clean bottles and leave as little airspace between the wine and the cork as possible – no more than ½ inch.

Al Barker is a wine making expert. Al has spent the past 16 years mastering white wine making.

In Al’s many years he has not only made world class wine himself, but has also taught hundreds of people white wine making.

One Response to “Ten Tips For Successful White Wine Making”

1. Vietnamese Cooking, Bloody Mary Soup Shots and MORE!  Chef Blog Digest on January 5th, 2011 5:58 pm

   [...] Ten Tips For Successful White Wine Making [...]

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