"Warm-Up" Wine Step 1: Primary Fermentation

Our first step in setting up a garage winery from scratch was to buy equipment. Fortunately, the friendly guys at The Oak Barrel sell everything a novice winemaker might need. It's pretty cool that Berkeley has a winemaking shop, and it's an especially convenient walk from Burdell Cellars.

Here's some of our equipment. The big plastic bucket is the primary fermenter. That's where the concentrate (or, in the future, actual grapes) and the yeast go during the first step of winemaking.  The brushes are for cleaning the vessels. In this picture, we're sanitizing the primary fermenter and brushes with a percarbonate solution--apparently this is a disinfectant of choice in the food and drink industry because it disinfects then decomposes to water.

Kierston and Forrest are dumping the bag of concentrate into the fermenter. The concentrate is Cabernet Sauvignon juice with sugar plus sulfites already added. Again, for future batches, we'd be putting crushed grapes in here.

Once all the concentrate was in the bucket, we diluted to 23 liters (or roughly 6 gallons) total volume, which will eventually yield thirty bottles of wine. We added some wine yeast, which is nothing more than a selected strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  In total, we added 5 grams of yeast, quite a lot, but probably necessary to ferment the 23 liters.

Here's a closeup!

Our wine kit also came with oak chips--this is a great way to give the wine an oak barrel-aged flavor without getting an actual oak barrel. It's not as authentic, of course, so we've contemplated acquiring an actual oak barrel in the future, which might not be so insane as it sounds. Here's Forrest preparing our "oak float," the name we gave to our boiled oak chip solution.

 This is what the proto-wine looks like with the oak chips stirred in.

Finally, we sealed the fermenter and attached the airlock. Within a day or two, the airlock started "burping," releasing carbon dioxide as a fermentation byproduct--that's how we knew we were making wine!

Next time: transferring to a carboy for the secondary fermentation.