A lot of money can be saved by a do-it-yourself lifestyle, and one of the easiest ways to do so begins by making your own wine at home. Fortunately, there aren’t laws pertaining to the volume of beverage that would apply to the typical home producer– you’d have to have a production of at least a hundred gallons per adult in household per year for any bureaucrat to care, if anyone was actually keeping track.

You can start making your own wine for just a few dollars. When i began the journey, my equipment list was as follows:

• 2 used gallon wine jugs
• 1 two gallon boiling pot
• 1 large stirring spoon
• 1 large balloon (the most primitive of airlocks)
• 1 funnel that fits in the mouth of the wine jug
• 1 ingredient straining bag
• a cookstove with a range
• 1 thermometer to measure liquid temps between 60 and 212 degrees fahrenheit
• a book on home winemaking recipes (about $5)

That was it.  You do not have to spend hundreds of dollars to get started in this hobby, it can be achieved on a shoestring budget.

The ingredients are up to you, once you determine what you plan to make. I successfully produced many one-gallon batches of flower, fruit, and vegetable wines using simple recipes.  There are a few axioms that must be integrated into your process:

1. Sanitize all equipment prior to use.
2. Only use wine yeast.
3. The yeast should be introduced after the cook and not until the liquid is within a certain temperature range, specified on the yeast packet.
4. after the yeast is added, cap the bottle with the airlock, but poke a small hole for the release of excess gas as you do not want the fermentation to blow the airlock off the mouth of the bottle.
5. It is important to keep things out of the bottle, including air, until the fermentation is finished.

I have scaled my process up to 5-10 gallon batches at a time, and use ingredients that produce very drinkable (12+%) wines for about $1.00 per 750-ml bottle. There are high-quality winemaking kits available at supply stores, and if you want to make a specialty wine you may be paying up to $100.00 or more for the concentrate to produce 4-5 gallons. Still, in the end your per unit price will round out to about 3 to 4 dollars per bottle.

The time spent preparing the wine for fermentation usually pales in comparison to the most mundane, and critical, element of the process– equipment cleaning. Contaminants can enter the brew at any stage, from different directions, which will result in a total loss of the product.

Long-term storage of wine is much easier than beer due to its higher alcohol content, and sterilization of the storage vessels is key. Storage temperature is less important than sanitary containers, and i have had large batches of wine keep for years at variable room temperatures.