Nowadays, people around the world are making their own wine. It’s a fun way to enjoy a particular type of fruit wine that you may not normally find in your local wine shop. Many folks who decide to try winemaking, experience the pride of serving their own bouquet to friends, family, and neighbors.

With home wine making you can be assured of the wine’s ingredients.  With all the confusion today over organic, biodynamic, and semi-organic wines, you’re never quite sure what you’re getting. If you decide to make organic wine from home, you know exactly how your grapes were grown, and what kind of preservatives and sulfites were added in the winemaking process.

When you make wine from scratch, you have several choices about how to get your grapes.  You can grow them yourself, which can take years, and require lots of work.  You can buy organic grapes from a vineyard, which is less effort, but may not give you the full satisfaction of the complete winemaking process.  And, lastly you can buy grape concentrates which may not yield the flavor you were looking for.

Home wine makers can add various ingredients to enhance the flavor of the grapes, to create a higher alcohol content, and to preserve the freshness of the wine and prevent oxidation. You can ferment grape juice in its own yeast, but most wine makers don’t want to take the chance.

You can also choose to add sugar or honey to grapes with lower sugar content. Some home winemakers add wood chips to get the woody flavor without storing the wine in wood barrels for long periods of time. And of course, every organic wine maker must ask him or herself whether to add sulfites, and if so how much. 

Sulfites prevent oxidation and spoiling of the wine.  But most wines that are certified organics are limited in the amount of sulfites that can be added in the wine making process. The fermentation process naturally creates sulfites, so you’ll need to be careful in your assessment.

If you want to make your own wine without all the hassle, you can buy home winemaking kits that include grape concentrate, yeast, nutrients, and preservatives, as well as the basic equipment you’ll need like a bucket, carboy, hydrometer, a siphon, and corks.  Some kits come with organic ingredients and limited additives.  These kits usually only require adding water and sugar. So they are handy, and come in several different wine types including Chardonnay, Reisling, Sherry, Port, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chianti, Merlot, Shiraz, and White Zinfandel.

All kits come with some sort of wine making instructions, and will generally yield a good bottle of wine in about three weeks.

With the movement towards organic winemaking, regular people are challenging themselves to get back to nature and to create a wine that is rich, flavorful, and aromatic without compromising the holistic values of organics.

Red wine is different from white wine in several aspects including how it’s made, proper serving temperatures, and its health benefits. It also has developed a reputation as a robust, rich drink to be savored with a cigar or a good steak.  It is the masculine wine

when red wine is made, it gets its color from the grape’s skin. The grapes are crushed and the skins are left in the juice.  Tannins and flavanoids, healthy antioxidants, are naturally occurring substances found in the grape skins that are released into the wine.  Since the skins are left in during the winemaking process, red wines have a much higher level of flavanoids and tannins than white wine.

Health Benefits

Everyone knows red wine has healthy affects on the body, but what are those health benefits? And why are they mostly present in red wine and not white?
Because red wine is made by leaving the grape skins in for a period of time, the antioxidant flavanoids have a chance to be released into the wine.  Studies have shown that antioxidants like catechins and resveratrol prevent free-radicals from destroying cells in the body.  They also boost the immune system, prevent some types of cancer, and prevent heart disease.

Serving Recommendations

Red wine should be served at a warmer temperature than white wine. 57-68 °F is a perfect temperature for reds.  Room temperature is thought to be reasonable for red wine.  However, some prefer it a bit cooler during the summer. Nowadays, every wine seems to have its own glass.  Generally red wine is served in a larger bowl shaped glass than white wines, but red can be served in a traditional 10 oz wine glass.  Keep in mind that when serving red wine, you should never fill the glass more than two thirds full. Some European studies and a 2003 Harvard study has demonstrated that resveratrol may prevent Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease by preserving cognitive function in the elderly. 

Keep in mind that healthful benefits of red wine come from moderate consumption of one to two glasses a day.  Anything more than that and the healthful effects decrease.  So, more is definitely not better in this case.

Red Wine Aging

After wine has been in the bottle for a while, it changes. The strong fruity tastes begin to mellow. the astringent tannins in red wine relax and start feeling smooth in your mouth. Once the strong tannins take a backseat, the more subtle flavors can make an appearance.
With age, red wine’s most powerful flavors subside and all the smells and tastes will blend and swirl together. And people pay a premium for that process. But if you love cabernet because of all the blackberry fruit tastes, you might not like it to be aged. And, let’s not forget the time and trouble of storing the wine to enable the aging process.  This alone can drive up the cost of premium aged red wine.