How to Use a Wine Making Kit, Step by Step

Before you start

Sanitize everything, and read the whole leaflet

Wine kits are forgiving about most things and unforgiving about sanitation. Everything that touches the juice after the initial mixing needs to be sanitized: the bucket, the lid, the spoon, the siphon, the carboy, the bung, the airlock, the hydrometer and the test jar. Clean first with an alkaline wash, then sanitize with a no-rinse sanitizer.

Then read the entire instruction leaflet before day one, not stage by stage. Kits differ in the order of their additives -- some add oak at secondary, some at primary, some stagger the fining agents across several days -- and discovering on day twenty that you were supposed to have done something on day fourteen is the most common avoidable problem.

The equipment list is short and mostly shared with beer brewing. If you already brew you likely own all of it except the corker. The full list is in wine making equipment list.

Step 1

Primary fermentation in the bucket, 5 to 7 days

1. Mix the juice with water to the volume the kit specifies, usually six gallons, in the primary bucket. Warm water helps the concentrate dissolve and gets the batch to pitching temperature.
2. Take and record the starting gravity. Most kits start somewhere around 1.080 to 1.095. You need this number to calculate the alcohol later -- the arithmetic is in how to calculate ABV.
3. Add the additives in the order the kit lists them, then pitch the yeast on the surface without stirring it in.
4. Cover with the lid resting on, not sealed. Primary fermentation produces a lot of CO2 and benefits from some air exchange. A sealed bucket at this stage will lift its own lid.

Hold the primary between 68 and 75 F. Wine yeast is tolerant but not indifferent: too cold and it stalls, too warm and you get hot, solventy notes. A wrap heater and a controller handle a cold room -- see fermentation heaters.

Rack to the carboy when gravity reaches about 1.010, which usually takes five to seven days. Do not wait for the airlock to stop bubbling; go by the hydrometer.

Step 2

Secondary fermentation, and the headspace rule

Siphon into the carboy, leaving the gross lees behind. From this point the relationship with oxygen inverts completely: in primary a little air helped the yeast, and from here air is the enemy. Wine oxidizes far more readily than beer, and oxidized wine tastes flat, sherry-like and brownish.

That is why the headspace rule matters so much. A carboy should be filled to the base of the neck, not half way up the shoulder. If the batch does not quite fill it, top up -- with a similar commercial wine, with sanitized water if you must accept the dilution, or with sterile marbles to displace volume. A carboy with three inches of air above the wine for a month will oxidize.

This single problem is what the variable-capacity stainless tank exists to solve: its floating lid drops to the wine line so there is no headspace to fill. For a first kit it is overkill, but it is the reason those tanks look so appealing on your third batch -- see best wine fermenters.

Step 3

Degassing, which the instructions understate

When fermentation is finished -- gravity at or below 0.996 and stable across two readings days apart -- the wine is saturated with dissolved CO2. Degassing removes it, and it is the stage most often done badly.

It matters for two reasons. A wine still holding CO2 tastes spritzy and slightly sharp in a way that reads as a fault in a still wine. More importantly, dissolved gas prevents the fining agents from working: fining relies on fine particles aggregating and falling, and a constant upward drift of tiny bubbles keeps them in suspension. Wine that will not clear is very often wine that was not degassed.

1. Bring the wine to room temperature first. Cold wine holds CO2 much more stubbornly. Degassing at 50 F is largely wasted effort.
2. Use a degassing paddle on a drill at low speed, or stir vigorously by hand for considerably longer than feels necessary. Expect foam. Stop when stirring stops producing a fresh surge of bubbles.
3. Do it in stages. Stir, wait an hour, stir again. Gas continues to come out of solution between sessions, and two moderate passes beat one frantic one.

Step 4

Fining, clearing and when to bottle

Add the fining agents in the order and at the intervals the kit specifies. Most kits supply two: a negatively charged agent and a positively charged one, and the sequence matters because they work by attracting opposite charges on suspended particles. Adding them together or in the wrong order wastes both.

Then leave it alone. Two to four weeks in a cool, dark place, topped up, with the airlock full. Clearing is a passive process and the only thing that speeds it up is time and stillness. Moving the carboy, or racking repeatedly to check, puts particles back into suspension.

Bottle when the wine is genuinely clear -- you should be able to read print through the carboy -- and not before. Bottling cloudy wine does not produce clear wine in the bottle; it produces thirty bottles with sediment in them. This is the single most common reason a kit wine disappoints, and the fix costs nothing but patience.

After bottling

How long before it is good

Kit wine is drinkable at bottling and considerably better three months later. White wines and lighter reds come round in two to three months. Full-bodied reds -- amarone-style kits especially -- genuinely need six to twelve months, and tasting one at week two will tell you nothing useful except that it is young.

Store bottles on their side in a cool, dark, stable place. Temperature swings are worse than a steady temperature that is slightly too warm, because they drive the cork in and out microscopically and pull air in with it.

Open one bottle a month and write down what you taste. That record is what turns the next kit from a repeat into an improvement, and it is the single habit that separates people who make good kit wine from people who make the same kit wine repeatedly.

Where this came from

The basis for this

Kit composition, batch volumes and equipment contents are the manufacturers' published specifications for the products named above. The sequence, gravity targets and timings reflect standard wine kit instructions and long-standing home winemaking practice rather than a single manufacturer's leaflet -- always follow the specific additive order supplied with your kit. See how we pick.