The Underhill Journal

After a long spell of not posting I've decided to chronicle our home making and growing activities, mostly for our own reference (it's good to keep a record of these things!) but also in case it is of any use to anybody else thinking about getting into home made and grown produce.
We were recently given a large bundle of wine making equipment, so we're just making our first forays into home made wine. So far we have had a successful batch of Cherry wine using a wine making kit. It was a seven day Soloman Grundy wine and rather tasty. You can see where we purchase our kits from the Hop Shop and learn a bit more about them. Currently we have a Beaverdale Cabernet Sauvingnon which will be ready in the next couple of days and an apple wine made from a recipe which I will post later. The apple wine will not be ready for about six months, according to the recipe. We'll get about six bottles from each of these, and we got about six bottles out of the Cherry wine too.
So, now we're being a bit more adventurous and making a 30 bottle batch of Merlot from a Soloman Grundy kit. Here's a photographic explanation of what we did.

We started by adding 5 litres of boiling water to our fermentation bucket then we added four kilo's of sugar.

Which we stirred until the sugar had entirely dissolved.


Next we added the wine concentrate from the kit.


Which again we stirred.

Next we added the yeast nutrient and the yeast, which we stirred in.


And finally we put on the lid and put it in our living room (the warmest room in our house) to ferment.


We have been given one piece of advice from everyone we've spoken to that has made wine before and that is to make sure everything is clean and sterile! Boil everything your going to use and if possible invest in campden tablets to make sure everything stays sterile.
I'll keep the blog updated on the progress of the wine.