Many of us use the fruits from our orchards and gardens to make a little country wine. While most equipment and supplies can be purchased through wine supply stores and mail order houses, a large portion of the required equipment can be purchased new at Wal Mart and Dollar Stores for a fraction of the cost. Examples are siphons ( buy the $1 pump bulb at a dollar store and a 25 cent wacky straw instead of a rack tube with siphon line for $4 or more at a wine store). Why pay $15 for a bottle washer when a wacky straw cut to a "j" shape with a little aquarium air hose as a gasket will fit in the hose end of a hand held shower hose with the shower massage unscrewed? Just divert to the shower line and high pressure the bottles or carboy. Why pay $30 for a heavy glass carboy when you can buy a lightweight plastic one at a store that sells water cooler spring water for $5 to $7 and use the water for the first batch and keep the jug? Why buy a plastic bucket when you can get it for free by buying laundry detergent in bulk and bleach the bucket when its empty? Why spend $150 for an aging barrel when you can buy oak chips from E.C. Kraus Supply for $3 and have enough to "oak barrel age' twenty carboys of wine ? Why buy fermentation bubblers for $2 when a $1 siphon hose and a soda bottle work as well? Why buy a $200 wine press when Steves' CS garbage disposal design for under $75 or a $12 blender do great? A little creative thinking and shopping around can easily save the homestead winemaker hundreds of dollars.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), August 05, 2001

Answers

Great ideas for a wanna be wine maker. Right now I wouldn't call what I make wine...course nobody else calls it wine either.

Hootch! that is all I have been able to achieve so far, but I am working on it!

note: everyone that drinks it comes back for more :)

hiccup!

-- westbrook (westbrook_farms@yahoo.com), August 05, 2001.

I still have a partial bottle of my first real attempt after watching and helping my father make our yearly jug for 10 years. I used some muscodine grapes and ended up with a wine that smelled like copier fluid filtered through compost and tasted like gasoline and chewed up asprin. I still smell that bottle once in a while to savour how much better I make my annual 5 gallon jug now (still won't taste that garbage` again though).

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), August 05, 2001.

Hm, well, one thing I would recommend against in saving money is the balloon on the top of the fermentation vessel thing. Years ago, when I had just started, some instructions Said that if you would put a common toy rubber balloon over the top, the expanding gases would inflate the balloon and you wouldn't need a fermentation lock.

Darn stuff expanded right on up into the balloon, and in contacting the latex, it spoiled the whole gallon of wine. Tasted awful.

-- julie f. (rumplefrogskin@excite.com), August 05, 2001.

Jay, I would go for the $30 heavy glass carboy over the plastic jug. The plastic jug won't last, will pick up odors, and most of those plastics are known to react with what's in them as the plastic degrades (rapidly) with age. They don't even recommend using old plastic jugs to store water in for any appreciable amount of time.

Another source of plastic buckets is a local restaurant. They get the 5 gallon food grade plastic buckets full of everything from pickles to mustard to soy sauce, and many will give them away.

-- Sojourner (notime4@summer.spam), August 05, 2001.

If you use plastic for the pail I'd recommend food grade plastic rather than that used for laundry detergent. A free/cheap source is bakeries that make donuts, they get their frosting in food grade plastic pails and often give away the pails when they're empty.

I used to brew beer and just tried a half-way attempt at a simple wine recipe with open fermentation as the first step...it went too far and turned to vinegar :(

Susan

-- Susan Troxel DeWitt (smtroxel@socket.net), August 05, 2001.

Use blue tint water cooler jugs only, not the clear plastic. The blue tint do not deteriorate as quickly as the clear plastic. I was only able to use the clear ones for 1 to 3 workings, the blue tint are still suitable after 6 years, no appreciable taste difference or component test differences to glass. The same goes toward the open fermentation pails. After proper sterilization with sodium metabisulphite or bleach and extensive rinsing, biodegradable laundry buckets test as well as food grade pickle and frosting buckets.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), August 05, 2001.

Sorry, meant biodegradable laundry detergent, not biodegradable buckets.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), August 05, 2001.

Cool! I'll admit scratching my head a bit but now it makes sense that the detergent was biodegradeable.

I was thinking of trying the balloon thing since I couldn't find a cork big enough to drill through or tubing to put in it for a fermentation lock. This was just with standard local shopping. Thanks for the info above on the latex problem.

I also wondered about using an old vinegar glass gallon bottle for secondary fermentation (a mute point in my case)...but if I try again, should I avoid old vinegar bottles?

-- Susan Troxel DeWitt (smtroxel@socket.net), August 05, 2001.

We can really relate to your description of smell/taste of first attempt at wine making. We have a similiar bottle we use to sniff (not taste) to remind us. Thanks for a good "laugh out loud" :)

-- Victoria Tompkins (vtompkins@earthlink.net), August 05, 2001.

Jay, you are just too cool! I am printing your post and going on a mission around town!

-- Terri in NS (Terri@tallships.ca), August 06, 2001.

Vinegar jugs work nice for 1 gallon batches. A ballon can be used, but its not as efficient as a waterlock, because it can allow air to get into the container during fermentation.I have seen ballons successfully used by putting a small square of duct tape on the ballloon and then making a pinhole through the tape and balloon to allow pressure to release without bursting the balloon.

I used a balloon, bubblegum and styrofoam cup to make a bubbler just to see if it would work . It did. I made a pencil sized hole in the styro cup, put my pinhole tape and pinhole on the lower hemisphere of the round ballon. Then put the end of the pencil in the end of the balloon (which was already through the hole in the cup). Used the bubblegum to seal the crack between cup and latex. After the gum hardened, sreached the ballon end over the bottle and taped the cup in place on top. as pressure built in the balloon, it released threough the taped pinhole and bubbled through the water in the cup. Drawbacks to this are that the wine can produce more gases then the pinhole can expel sometimes and blow the bubbler off.

A 1/4 dia sterilized aquarium hose run into a soda bottle full of water is much better and if you lack a cork, just drill a plastic cap that fits snuggly over the top and seal it with canning paraffin.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), August 06, 2001.