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Start Winemaking At Home! People all over the world are discovering that winemaking at home is not only fun but can also lead to an extra source of income . They are producing premium wines out of their very own homes and garages. If winemaking sounds interesting to you, you can start right away with a winemaking kit available at Amazon.com. These kits are simple, fun, and great to experiment with. They can help you decide whether winemaking is right for you without having to buy expensive equipment. Complete kits are available to be shipped right to your home and will provide all the tools, including the fruit. They are designed to get you started right away. If you don't see one you like at Amazon, check out the Home Brew Supply.
Helpful information on the web: Learn about Varietals and Wine Regions  You can find a wide variety of winemaking kits at Ebay. Learn about winemaking in Colorado! Winemaking From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Winemakers often use carboys like these to ferment smaller quantities of wine. Winemaking, or vinification, is the process of wine production, from the selection of grapes to the bottling of finished wine.
After the harvest, the grapes are crushed and allowed to ferment. Red wine is made from the must (pulp) of red or black grapes that undergo fermentation together with the grape skins, while white wine is usually made by fermenting juice pressed from white grapes, but can also be made from must extracted from red grapes with minimal contact with the grapes' skins. Rosé wines are made from red grapes where the juice is allowed to stay in contact with the dark skins long enough to pick up a pinkish color, but little of the tannins contained in the skins.
During this primary fermentation, which often takes between one and two weeks, yeast converts most of the sugars in the grape juice into ethanol (alcohol). After the primary fermentation, the liquid is transferred to vessels for the secondary fermentation. Here, the remaining sugars are slowly converted into alcohol and the wine becomes clear. Some wine is then allowed to age in oak barrels before bottling, which add extra aromas to the wine, while others are bottled directly. The time from harvest to drinking can vary from a few months for Beaujolais nouveau wines to over twenty years for top wines. However, only about 10% of all red and 5% of white wine will taste better after 5 years, compared to after one year.
Variations on the above procedure exist. With sparkling wines such as Champagne, an additional fermentation takes place inside the bottle, trapping carbon dioxide and creating the characteristic bubbles. Sweet wines are made by ensuring that some residual sugar remains after fermentation is completed. This can be done by harvesting late (late harvest wine), freezing the grapes to concentrate the sugar (ice wine), or adding a substance to kill the remaining yeast before fermentation is completed; for example, high proof brandy is added when making port wine. In other cases the winemaker may choose to hold back some of the sweet grape juice and add it to the wine after the fermentation is done, a technique known as süssreserves.
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