The First Year of Growing Your Wine Grapes!

The first year that your grape vine is growing tie the strongest shoot to the trellis with a piece of string. String does not damage the shoot like a wire could. Clip any other shoots that grow from the roots. When the vine is in the dormant season you will need to once again prune your vine back.

In the spring when the buds have begun to grow again, select the strongest shoots from the upright shoot and tie them loosely to the wire as they grow. These shoots will become the arms of the vine where the grapes will grow in years to come. Also, planting grape cuttings is the easiest way to grow grapes. Grapevines easily sprout from cuttings taken during their dormant period, and they are best when planted in the early spring after the last frost has left the ground, before the buds begin to swell.

When it comes time for you to harvest your grapes, it will be beneficial to purchase what they call a hydrometer. It can be bought from a local wine making supply shop. A Hydrometer measures the specific gravity of liquids. It will tell you the sugar content of the berries. An ideal gravity is between 1.095 and 1.105, the latter being the better one. It is then time to harvest the grapes.

The process of growing grapes and grape planting can take years in order to make wine but, with the right amount of effort the process is simple and well worth the reward you will receive in the end.

More Sites and Resources Talking About Growing Grapes & Making Wine at Home:

* Grape Growing & Wine Making

* Squidoo Lens for Home Wine Making Instructions

* Wine Makers from Home

* Tips for Making Red Wine

Making Wine at Home

Making wine at home could not be made much easier. If you have always wanted to make wine by yourself and didn’t know how, then you came to the right place. Lots of people around the world have found ways of making wine at home and have reaped the rewards from it. Even though you will need some equipment to make wine at home, it is not necessary that you have to have costly equipment which demands a lot of

investment. It is also not necessary to have a lot of open space too!

Actually, it is very simple to make wine at home. The whole process actually involves only crushing a fruit or some concentrate in a container and then allowing it to be condensed over a period of time. After which the resulting process would not require a lot of process from you. In fact, all that you’ll need to do would be to see to that you combine the proper ingredients, mash them and then give it the proper environment to stabilize.

Before you start making wine at home, you need to come up with a recipe that you could use to make wine. It may be the hardest step as there are a lot of wine making guides available. There are a number of wine making kits that are available which will help you choose a recipe for your wine. Along with the recipe it is also necessary to choose the kind of fruit that you will be using in your wine. Other than Grapes there are other fruits like blueberry, strawberry etc that can be used.

In fact, it is good to have wine making kits during the initial stages of wine making as it helps to simplify the overall process. Lots of beginners begin with a wine making kit as it has good recipes to make wines and at the same time has got detailed descriptions of the process.

Other than making wine from a ripe fruit, it could be made from a concentrated juice. Concentrated juices are available in a lot of places. In fact, most of the concentrated juices will have a how-to-do recipes and hence it will help you to make your first batch better. For this purpose many first time wine makers opt to use concentrated juices than fruits to make wine, not only because of its usability but also because of its availability all year around unlike the fruits.

To make your first batch of wine at home, it is mandatory to have certain ingredients. It is necessary to have these ingredients whether you use a fruit or concentrated juice.

They are as follows:

A.) The most vital ingredient is yeast. It starts the fermentation process

B.) Next is, pectic enzyme. It assists in the fermentation process by allowing the particles to breakdown

C.) Then, Acid blend is used to control the sharpness present in the wine.

D.) Also, Wine tannin is used as the zest of the fruit. It is also available in the powder form.

E.) Campden tablets are used before the fermentation process and it is also used before the wine is bottled. These tablets are used to ensure that the wine does not get spoiled.

In this way, wine making at home could be made very simple

Happy Wine Making!!


More Sites and Resources Talking About Growing Grapes & Making Wine at Home:

• The How to Grow Grapes & Make Wine at Home Website
  
• Website on Grape Planting
• Squidoo Lens on Wine Making Instructions
• Wine Making at Home
• Squidoo on Red Wine Making
• Blog on Making Wine & Growing Wine Grapes for Beginners