Our Ancestors Knew How To Make Wine Out Of Necessity
Michalis 'BIG Mike' Kotzakolios


Defined Tag: How To Make Wine.

If you think it is difficult to learn how to make wine, you are right. There are so many things that can go wrong with wine making, and only one way it can go right! Consider this fact about making wine, though. Centuries or even decades ago, the cost of a bottle of commercially produced wine was beyond most ordinary people. Therefore they had to learn to make their own wine. They sometimes did it successfully without much of the knowledge and technology available today. The basic wine making steps are not difficult, but the difference between making wine and vinegar is in the details.

Grapes are the first ingredient for wine making. If the early wine makers didn't have their own vineyard, they had to buy grapes suitable for making wine. Differences in grapes, ingredients, and techniques caused these early winemakers to produce wines that varied wildly in taste and alcohol content. Once they settled on a suitable technique, however, they often kept producing that particular wine.

Grapes need to be crushed into juice and pulp before they become wine. Popular culture tells us that this is done by maidens with very clean feet. Honestly, a butter churn would produce grape juice that is similar in quality. White wine comes from the juice of white grapes, while red wine is made from the pulp and skins of black or red grapes. These early vintners weren't trying to outdo Paris, though. All they wanted to do was make some cheap home wine.

The grape juice ferments due to yeast activity. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grape juice and converts it into drinking alcohol, also called ethanol. After a week or two of initial fermentation, the new wine undergoes a second fermenting step. During this second step, the remaining sugars are converted to alcohol, and the wine becomes clearer. Today these winemaking steps are carried out in large steel vats in a winery. Our early winemaking ancestors probably performed these steps in the root cellar with wooden barrels.

At this point in the wine process, the product is ready to bottle or to drink. The old farmer or settler would smell the new wine first, and use it as weed killer if it tasted bad. It was easy for more than yeast to grow in the barrels of warm sugary grape juice. If molds, bacteria, or even the wrong strain of yeast took over the fermentation process, the batch of home wine was a failure. If you are not the adventurous type, ignore this advice about how to make wine and stop by the wine store on your way home.

BIG Mike is a well known author, developer and Adsense expert as well as the owner of Niche Maniacs - a unique Adsense Marketing System designed to build long-term passive income streams from Adsense, Amazon, YPN, Chitika and other PPC services.