Wine Making Equipment List

Tier 1

Essential: a kit assumes you have all of these

1. A primary fermenter, 7-8 gallons. A food-grade bucket or a wide-mouth HDPE vessel. You need headspace above a 6 gallon must, and for reds you need access to punch down the cap of skins that forms.
2. A 6 gallon carboy or demijohn for secondary and bulk aging. Glass is correct here -- the wine sits for months and glass is the only completely oxygen-impermeable common option.
3. A bung and airlock sized to the carboy neck. A #6.5 or #7 bung fits most 6 gallon carboys; check yours.
4. An auto-siphon and tubing. Wine gets racked more than beer does, and each rack is an oxygen risk, so a siphon that starts cleanly and runs gently matters.
5. A hydrometer and test jar. The only way to know your starting gravity, confirm fermentation finished, and calculate ABV.
6. No-rinse sanitizer, more than you expect. Wine involves more transfers across a longer period than beer.
7. A long-handled spoon or paddle for stirring the must and punching down reds.

Tier 2

Needed on bottling day, not day one

• Thirty wine bottles. A 6 gallon kit yields around 30 bottles. Used bottles are fine if thoroughly cleaned and label-stripped; avoid any with screw threads if you are corking.
• A corker and corks. Hand corkers exist and are miserable for 30 bottles; a floor corker is the right tool and is the classic thing to borrow from a local club or shop rather than buy.
• A bottling wand or a bottle filler, so you fill to a consistent level without splashing.
• A bottle tree or drying rack, which turns the sanitizing step from a juggling act into a process.

Tier 3

Buy later, or never

• A variable-capacity stainless tank. Genuinely the best vessel for wine, because its floating lid eliminates headspace at every volume. Also expensive and larger than one kit needs. Buy it when you know you will keep making wine -- best wine fermenters.
• A degassing wand. Useful for stirring dissolved CO2 out before fining on a 6 gallon batch, and a long spoon and patience will also do it.
• A pH meter and acid test kit. Real tools for adjusting balance, and not a first-kit concern -- kits are formulated to land in range.
• A filter system. Produces brilliant clarity and strips some character doing it. Time and fining agents achieve most of the same result for free.
• Oak cubes, spirals or chips beyond what the kit includes. Worth experimenting with later; do not add oak to a first batch on top of what the kit already specifies.

Already own it

What transfers from beer brewing

If you brew beer, your actual shopping list for a wine kit is short: the kit, 30 bottles, corks and access to a corker. Everything else is on your shelf -- hydrometer, auto-siphon, tubing, airlocks, bungs, sanitizer, a long spoon, and a temperature-controlled chamber that wine benefits from as much as beer does.

The one habit to change concerns vessels. Beer leaves its fermenter in weeks, so a PET carboy or a bucket is fine. Wine sits for months, which makes oxygen permeability and headspace the central concerns -- use glass or stainless for aging, and keep it full. The full reasoning is in demijohn vs carboy.