What do you really need to start making wine?
It is a fair question, because people have been making the stuff since at least 4000 BC, long before stainless-steel tanks, glycol cooling, cross-flow filters, laboratory analysis or touchscreens told a winemaker what was happening inside a fermentation tank.
The ancients managed with whatever they could build themselves. Grapes went into clay pots, wooden containers, stone vessels and later barrels.
So, do you really need the multimillion-rand cellar with suspended tanks and touchscreen integration?
Well, no. And, unfortunately, yes.
The difference is largely one word: consistency.
If you simply want to make something pleasant to drink on a summer afternoon, wine is remarkably accessible. A clean container, some decent grapes and enough basic winemaking knowledge to avoid doing anything spectacularly wrong will take you surprisingly far.
The difficulty starts when you want the wine to taste good every time.
There is a reason we continue to idolise the lone winemaker doing everything by hand. It is a compelling picture: a few rows of vines, a small press, several barrels and somebody tasting wine directly from the tank while deciding what it needs next.
Home winemaking traditions remain strong in many parts of the world. In some countries, a larder, garage or barn almost seems incomplete without some sort of container bubbling away in a corner during harvest. Many of the wine styles and techniques we now regard as deeply traditional developed from exactly this type of practical, local winemaking. Think of amphora wines, Georgian qvevri, Sherry and Madeira. None began because somebody commissioned an architectural rendering of a R100-million cellar. They developed because people used what they had, learned what worked and repeated it.
Your biggest problem may not be winemaking equipment at all. It may be getting hold of grapes. Supermarket grapes look perfect. They are big, crisp and sweet, and Woolworths can tell you in great detail just how sweet they are. Unfortunately, that does not necessarily make them good wine grapes. Table grapes have been selected to be pleasant to eat. Wine grapes have a different relationship between juice, skins, seeds, acidity, sugar and flavour. Even wonderfully sweet supermarket grapes can simply be too watery to produce the wine you are imagining.
Luckily, if you live in the Western Cape, or even somewhere such as Upington, you will probably drive past the raw material you need sooner or later. During harvest, take a small detour and ask. A friendly farmer may be surprisingly accommodating especially if arriving with a six-pack of beer or a fresh batch of mosbolletjies
Red is probably the easiest place to start
Red grapes are relatively forgiving for a small home experiment. The anthocyanins and tannins extracted from the skins provide some protection against oxidation, and red-wine fermentation is generally less dependent on the very low temperatures often used to preserve delicate white-wine aromas. That means you can potentially make a perfectly drinkable red wine in a reasonably cool room without installing a refrigeration plant in your garage. Crush the grapes and allow them to ferment with the skins.
You do need to keep an eye on what is happening. Fermentation produces heat, and a container of fermenting grapes is very much alive. Keep things clean, keep the temperature sensible and regularly mix the skins back into the fermenting juice.
You want a light, juicy red, don’t overcomplicate it. After a day or two of skin contact, depending on how fermentation and extraction are progressing, press the wine off the skins and allow it to finish fermenting without them. You can end up with a perfectly adequate, youthful, Beaujolais-like style of red wine.
One of the easiest mistakes for an enthusiastic new winemaker is believing that more must automatically mean better.
More colour. More tannin. More extraction. More time on the skins. Once you have extracted too much, you now have another problem to solve.
Perhaps that means time. Perhaps oak. Perhaps blending. At the simplest home-winemaking level, wood chips can sometimes be used to bring some oak character and help integrate a wine, while a commercial producer may use barrels and considerably more sophisticated maturation decisions.
It is much easier not to overdo things in the first place.
Once fermentation is complete, get the wine into a full container so that there is as little unnecessary air above it as possible. Add the appropriate SO₂ protection, allow it to settle somewhere cool and then rack the clearer wine away from the heavier sediment. If you have a spare fridge large enough to accommodate your experiment, even better.
Drink young, cloudy wine with some restraint, though. A considerable amount of suspended yeast and sediment is not necessarily everyone’s digestive system’s favourite companion.
The R50-million question
So why does somebody spend millions building a winery when you can make wine in a container in your garage? Because you are making one container. They may be processing 50 tonnes before lunch. Your grapes can wait an hour while you find the hose. Theirs cannot. You can say, “This batch turned out a little strange.” A commercial winery may have 100,000 bottles already promised to retailers. You can put your ferment in the fridge. They need to cool 200,000 litres. You can wash your container in the kitchen. They need every tank, hose, pump, barrel, press and bottling line hygienically clean every day of harvest.
Modern winery infrastructure exists largely to remove variables.
Cooling systems control temperature. Stainless-steel tanks allow effective cleaning. Pumps move wine efficiently. Laboratory equipment tells the winemaker what is actually happening rather than what they hope is happening. Inert gases help manage oxygen. Filtration improves microbiological stability. Automated systems monitor multiple fermentations simultaneously.
And all of this allows a winemaker to do something far harder than making wine once.
It allows them to make the same wine again.
Some styles really do need more toys
Infrastructure also becomes unavoidable when the style itself becomes more complicated. Still wine is relatively straightforward. Sparkling wine is another story. Bottle-fermented sparkling wine may require specialised bottling equipment, pressure-resistant bottles, lees ageing, riddling, disgorging and specialised closures. Fortified wines such as Port-style wines bring their own requirements for fortification, spirit handling and maturation. Long-aged wines require barrels, storage space and years during which expensive wine is sitting in a cellar rather than being sold. Every additional stylistic ambition introduces another layer of equipment, knowledge, labour and risk.
Making wine is not particularly difficult. Making good wine deliberately, rather than accidentally, is harder. Making it again next year is harder still. Making 500,000 bottles that taste sufficiently similar that customers recognise the wine is a completely different challenge.
After trying it yourself, you may also look differently at the multimillion-rand winery with the suspended tanks, cooling jackets and touchscreen controls.
PS. for those of a more handy nature and of sufficient energy I can recommend Home Built Winery by Steve Hughes
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