A lot of Peace Corps volunteers choose to make their own wine. Not only is it a fun project, but it saves a lot of money. A cheap bottle of wine is generally $6.00 for 750 ml . It costs us about $5.00 to make the equivalent to having 9 litres worth of wine. You can instantly see the savings for us. The basic process is outlined below, but we are tweaking the process to make the best wine possible. Our first batch was mango wine. We're currently fermenting pineapple wine with peach wine on-deck.
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| First, sanitize a bucket that can hold about 8 litres of water plus other solids. |
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| Prepare about 6 ripe mangoes, 2.5 kilograms of sugar, 3 vitamin C tablets (500mg) or use juice of lime or lemon, and 1-2 tablespoons of yeast. 1 tablespoon is required, the more yeast you use, the more alcoholic your wine. We used 2 tablespoons. |
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| 6 ripe mangoes, prepared |
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| After boiling 8 litres of water, add it to the bucket |
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| For a sweeter and less alcoholic wine, add the sugar all at once immediately into the boiling water. |
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| Add 2-3 tablets of 500mg Vitamin C or juice of a lemon or two. |
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| Add your fruit immediately |
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| Cover it temporarily |
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| Once the water becomes room temperature, add your yeast and stir. Cover it. |
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| Every 3 days, remove your cover/lid and stir the wine. Or shake the wine. This allows the yeast to keep activated to continue fermenting the fruit and eating the sugar, creating alcohol. |
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| Mixing.... |
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| After 3 weeks of fermenting which involves stirring every 3 days, it's time to bottle your wine. First, you need to strain out the fruit and trying to keep as much yeast as possible out of your bottles. |
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| Be sure to sanitize ALL bottles and filtering equipment |
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| The bottling process |
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| Our first bottle of wine |
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| Celebrated with our first glass of wine...though waiting 5 days to drink after bottling the wine reduces the yeasty tasty. |
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| Our yield for $5.00 |
That looks so awesome! We just might have to try it sometime!! How do you sanitize the bottles? Boil them for a certain amount of time?
ReplyDeleteBoiling the bottles is probably a better idea. We wash them in bleach water and let them air dry. We have to use plastic bottles until we collect enough empty glass bottles, so we have to do the bleach thing for those. But, I think I'll do the boiling water for the glass bottles our next time.
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