Would you believe there are people who are so anxious to know when or how long a wine matures whereas the truth is they just want to have a good drink of it? Actually, it is surprising that the number of people will not simply believe it that wines improve with age. They set about making wines possessed of urgency which should not exist and an impatience that is hard to believe. People really believe that wine can be made, matured and drunk in six or seven weeks. Of course with luck, you might get fermentation done and your wines clear and bottled in that time, but truly they can't be drinkable even so young.

Yes indeed I know it very well that you will be itching to get your teeth into that wine and you cannot blame yourself for that. Many winemakers desire to taste the latest batch to be bottled. Also, keeping the homemade wine at least a year before you manage to drink it seems to be a waste of time, especially after when you had a taste of it when siphoning it. So, remember this for your own sake. When it's bottling time, put two bottles or more in the basement or someplace where they can't be reached easily. Later on, those two bottles of each batch made will soon amount up to a nice little collection.

The whole secret of building up a stock is to make numerous lots at the same time and when a jar is emptied at bottling time, start again with another lot. In this way, you will always have a few gallons fermenting, several dozen bottles for use as needed and a dozen or so slowly growing into a nice reserve. Then, when the first two bottles put away for a year or two old you may sample them. These will have become such magnificent wines in that time that your lesson will have been well and truly learned and the vow took that hence forth half of all that is bottled is going to the attic.

Another good idea is to keep some of the wine for at least five years. After five years it is better than age four and three years is better than age two. These maturing times have been trusted by expert winemakers. The question is, are you ready to keep your wines long enough to have a magnificent taste?

In addition, wines should be stored at a temperature at which they remain constant throughout the year. Rapid changes of temperature are certainly best avoided, so if you can store your wines on a stone floor or in a cupboard which has a stone floor, so much the better; if you cannot do this, store your wines where you can and fret no more.

Wild yeasts and acetic bacteria are the two enemies of successful homemade wine making. The acetic bacteria converts alcohol into acetic acid thereby turning wine to vinegar is ever present in the air. Similarly, the yeasts and spores of fungi which turn wine insipid and flat or turn it sour are also in the air. When using fresh fruit and other ingredients from the garden or from the shops, the bacteria, yeasts and fungi are also present, but fret no more because they are easily destroyed so they do no harm.

Most ingredients used in making wine are supplied in containers and they will not be contaminated by these causes of spoilage. But, the water that you might use can contain harmful bacteria that can spoil the wine or possibly the wild yeast can cause poor ferments and these ferments could give 'off' flavors such as sour tastes.

It is not usually known that the molds on cheese, half-empty pots of meat paste and jam are often yeasts growing there for it is the yeast floating about in the air that ruins the wines that you make. So, in order to beat these souring yeasts, you must keep the fermenting wines and finished wines covered closely. Treatment of such finished wines is covered under the heading 'storing' and it is important that you cover fermenting wines.

As soon as the prepared yeasts have been added to the prepared liquid, the top of the jar should be covered with a piece of polythene and this should be pressed down all around by hand and a strong string should be tied tightly around. Through this you can keep airborne diseases away from the wine. It is also a good idea if you use a Fermentation lock instead of polythene.

The whole idea of using fermentation locks is to keep airborne diseases from contaminating the wine, so make sure the bung and lock are airtight. If not, the gas leaking will prevent air from reaching the wine and slow down the outgoing stream of gas through the leakage holes.

Having fitted the lock to the bung and jar, remember to run a little sealing wax where the bungs enter the jar and where the lock enters the bung. Actually this precaution may not be necessary, but it's better to be on the safe side. You can now remove one piece of the lock and bung and insert a new bung when fermentation ceased. The wine during this process can then be put away to clear.

An excellent reward of homemade wine making is to be able to flavor your wines with very little effort. This can be easily done with what is called T'Noirot extracts. No extra work is needed, the stuff is ready to use. T'Noirot extracts are blended to give flavors identical to popular liqueurs, thus you are assured of the real thing and not a fake substitute.

However, these flavorings are highly concentrated and should not, therefore be judged by their odor. Anyone smelling the raw undiluted material or sampling the wines made from the extracts is likely to imagine that something is not quite right. Do not pay any attention to the strength or pungency of the odor and do not sample any wines being made from the extract until fermentation has almost ceased. As with all other wines, the flavor improves immensely with age.

T'Noirot extracts are made from aromatic plants. The flavors are unique which makes them excellent for the use of wine making. When making wines using the extracts, your result will be a light but deep flavor and will be less expensive than using all fruit.

You will want to be sure to ferment the wine in a one gallon jar from start to finish. The reason for doing so is to save as much of the deposit until the very end. This residue will be where all of the unique flavors build up.

Do not divide the wine, into two half-gallon lots because half-gallon jars happen to be available. Keep it all together until fermentation is complete. After this has happened the clearer wine can be siphoned off the top into another jar and put away to clear. After is has done so, it can be bottled.

Here's a simple recipe to get you started:

Basic Wine made from T'Noirot extracts

Gather the following: 6 cherry brandy extract bottles, three pounds of sugar ,1 gal. purified water, one packet of yeast.

Take a large pot and boil one pound of the sugar in half a gallon of water for two minutes; allow cooling and then pour it into a gallon jar. The extract, & yeast can now be added. As directed cover and ferment in a warm place for ten days. Boil another third of the sugar in a quart of water for two minutes and add it to the rest. As before, continue to ferment in a warm place for a further fourteen days. Boil the rest of the sugar in the remaining quart of water as before and when cool add the rest. Cover and allow it to sit until all fermentation has ceased.

A wonderful syrup made of excellent quality Ribena could well be added to fermenting 'must haves' to get special results. If you use Ribena in winemaking, you should reduce the amount of sugar accordingly in whichever homemade wine recipes you have in mind. The addition of one or two bottles of Ribena per gallon can make a vast improvement to the flavor and even quality of the wine.

Apart from this, there is no costly fruit to buy, no messy crushing-in fact nothing much to do at all. And, most important of all, Ribena has been treated with a pectin-destroying enzyme, which means that you could boil it if you wished without fear of pectin clouding the finished wines. Such boiling would, of course, kick off the SO2 and give you wine flavored somewhat cooked blackcurrants. Apparently, what you wish to achieve when making wine with Ribena will be to lessen the amount of sugar to about three and a half pounds per gallon, by using half Ribena and half water. In doing this, you will lessen the SO2 preservative and this amount is not likely to prevent fermentation. Here's the stages you could use for the addition of Ribena syrup. All water used in the procedure was first boiled and has been cooled naturally.

Step 1: I use two bottles of Ribena diluted with twice the amount of water (four bottles full). Add yeast to the mixture be sure it is allowed to ferment for ten days.

Stage 2: After ten days of fermentation, two bottles of Ribena and one bottle of water were added and the mixture was allowed to ferment for a further ten days.

Stage 3: After twenty days of fermentation, two bottles of Ribena and one more bottle of water were added. The mixture was then allowed to ferment for completion, taking, in all, three months. Of course, the result was a good, round wine flavored delightfully though not too strongly of fresh blackcurrants.

Fermentation should be done in small-necked bottles plugged with cotton wool or fermentation locks. Racking wasn't carried out until about a month after the final addition & monthly racking followed until fermentation stopped. At a young age, this wine was nice to drink, but it improved enormously after 6 months.

You may be surprised to find that a high percentage of alcohol is not everything. Many various wines are made in the range of eight to eleven percent of alcohol at the lower end. Some wines made with the recipes based by the book, of course, while wines made by the recipes in most winemaking books are a good deal stronger than others made by brand names.

It makes sense that a good percentage of alcohol ensures that wines keep well for a longer period of time. Sometimes a stray spore of yeast, either left in the wine or contaminated, will begin to reproduce and live on the sugar present. The only way to avoid this is to make a homemade wine that is extremely dry in nature. But, not all people like dry wines.

Many people prefer their wines semi-sweet to sweet. Thankfully, the wines most recipes are based on in wine books keep well because they contain large enough amounts of alcohol to destroy yeast or bacteria that may remain. So the challenge lies in producing a sweet wine with a low alcohol content.

Overall the process in making low alcohol wines calls for adding just enough sugar to make the amount of alcohol needed and to allow the wine to ferment right out. A good rule of thumb is that wine will be too dry if you use less than two and a quarter pounds of sugar in one gallon. So, if two batches are being made, double the amount of sugar called for.

Very well then, you can now take any recipe in your winemaking book but not those containing dried fruit as these contain lots of sugar instead use one pound and fourteen ounces of sugar. If invert sugar is being used, remember that invert sugar contains some moisture, so for every pound of household sugar, you must use one and a quarter pounds of invert sugar. In addition, invert sugar is typically supplied in tins containing seven pounds or in blocks by whatever weight is ordered. If weighing this proves awkward, dissolve it and measure it again by the pint, considering that one pint represents two pounds of sugar.

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