GrapevineWineWorks

It will take more than some grapes and few empty bottles to make your own wine, but most of the wine making supplies are readily available. Many of the kits being sold in the market today contain everything needed to brew small batches of wine, except the grapes and in addition to the wine making materials in the kit, complete instructions and various recipes are included.

What You Need

Although there are many wine making items to choose from, if you are just a beginner there are really only a few basics that you will want to supply yourself with. One of the first things you will want to get is grape juice or concentrate. You can buy this separately or in the typical wine making kit, in which you will also get the other ingredients and tools that are required for basic winemaking. You are also going to have to get as many wine bottles, corks and labels for the amount of wine that you are planning to make. Keep in mind that if you are just getting started and making wine for the first time, stick to making just a few bottles until you get the hang of it and then you can feel comfortable spending more money and producing more wine. You also want to get a hydrometer as one of your wine making supplies, and you will be using this to help monitor the fermentation process which is the most important process of all when it comes to making wine. In other words the hydrometer is going to help you estimate when the wine is ready to bottle, and so this should definitely be one of the first pieces of equipment that you purchase.  

Some Equipment Is Optional

Measuring the acid in the grape squeezing can be done with litmus strips, but a more accurate content can be determined with an acid titration kit. A hydrometer is necessary for measuring the natural sugar to determine how much needs to be added. Other wine making supplies that will be needed include wine bottles for the finished product, corks and a hand corker. Clear plastic tubing is needed for transferring the wine into bottles and a nylon bag is
required for filtering the fermented wine before it is bottled.  

Reuse Your Bottles, But Not The Corks

When you are thinking about wine making supplies, you do not need to keep buying new bottles. You can simply reuse the bottles after a good cleaning. The stoppers however, need to be replaced every time you make wine. Now if you plan to give bottles of wine to family and friends, you might need to buy more bottles or ask for them back if they want another bottle of your next batch. Wine making equipment is not very expensive, but if you keep buying new bottles for every batch, it can add up.  

Despite the large list of wine making supplies that is needed, remember that most of the equipment and some of the materials can be used repeatedly. Ingredients will have to be replenished as needed, but the equipment, once cleaned and sanitized can be used numerous times as well as for making a variety of wines.

The small towns around Mount Macedon such as Woodend or Kyneton, which are located an hour North-West of Melbourne, and you can’t fail to miss the faintly Northern European feel of the place. Perhaps it is the crisp bite of a cool Spring day, the historical streetscapes or the patches of greenery from the recent winter rains but this is a unique and beautiful landscape.

Unsurprisingly within this cool environment, which encompasses a multitude of hills and valleys, are pockets of vineyards that are creating exquisite, modern styles of Australian wine. Yet, despite the obvious potential and some brilliant wines, for many the Macedon, surprisingly, remains an unknown.

The lack of any one strong brand driving the region’s fortunes certainly doesn’t help. No big company would even consider large-scale plantings here – the challenges are just too large and the yields too low. But for those vignerons that identify the right site and then put their all into grafting a quality product, there are tremendous rewards to reap. To date, the best known wines of the Macedon have been the local pinot noirs and chardonnays from the likes of Curly Flat and Bindi, with others such as Lanes End and Paramoor also showing promise. There is an Aladdin’s cave of potential sites yet to be explored; it seems more than likely that the quality of product in the Macedon is destined to go from strength to strength over the next ten to twenty years.

Recently at the Macedon Show I was again reminded that, while pinot noir and chardonnay have driven the region’s fortunes to date, the region also has a knack of consistently turning out some of Australia’s greatest Sparkling wines. In the old days that may not have meant so much but from cool mainland regions, today lead by the Macedon, as well as Tasmania, more and more locally produced wines are really challenging the quality of fine French Champagne. The Macedon instils in its best wines a delicacy and purity of acidity that is remarkably reminiscent of fine French bubbly. It’s no surprise in that vineyards in both the Macedon and Champagne are some of the coolest. The resulting wines their much-praised elegance while keeping intact a rigid core of acidity.

At the 2009 Macedon show, two sparkling wines, in particular, really impressed, and both from the same producer. The first was the Mount William Blanc de Blanc from 2001, a sparkling chardonnay that is still remarkably fresh and vibrant for its age, with bottle aged sweet brioche complexity just starting to build in the mouth while finishing fine and long. The Mount William ‘Jorja Alexis’ Pinot Noir Rosé from 2003, is a very pretty and subtle wine with multiple layers. The red berry and subtle earthy nuances are supremely balanced into a silky package.