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Basic Ingredients for Making Wine

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Part of the video series: How to Make Wine

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Summary: How to get the basic ingredients needed to make wine; learn more about wine in this free instructional video.

Views: 5,055 | Tags: make, wine, white, process, red, alcohol, grape, merlot, fermentation, winery, wines

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John Gizzi The owners of some wine schools say winemaking is becoming increasingly popular among Italian-Americans, especially those in their 30's and 40's who have memo... read more

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Video Transcript

Basic Ingredients for Making Wine

We use a number of pieces of chemistry to make good wine. One of them is yeast. Yeast is used to ferment the grapes. Yeast attacks sugar and PH2 byproducts, alcohol which is what we want and carbon dioxide which is the deadly gas, but in a wine facility we dissipate it pretty quickly and doesn’t hurt anybody, so that is what the yeast is for. The yeast uses a nutrient. This nutrient is what we call a super food. Super food is something that binds to the grapes and the sugars and it makes it a rich environment for the yeast. It’s got a nickname; The real name is yeast agara but the nickname is yeast Viagra. The third thing we use is tartaric acid. Tartaric acid is to balance the natural acids in the grapes. On some grapes of ours, we need some of this and we usually put in anywhere from 100 milligrams to 300 milligrams. And the fourth thing we use is sulfites. That is used to neutralize the natural yeast on the grapes. This natural yeast occurs in about a 1,000 different of varieties. Well, wine yeast is only about 5, and 5 of those are on grapes. As you can see, the balance is not there to make the good wine and that is why the old timers, their wines were all over the place. One year it was sweet, one year sour, one year, let’s call it vinegar, so anyway we use the sulfite. It will kill the natural yeast and then we inoculate it the next day. So 24 hours this yeast is making a super charge bucket and once that bucket is supercharged 24 hours later, we put it in and now it is a whole clean environment for the yeast to attack and do what it is supposed to do; create alcohol and make it wine.

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