Do you ever worry about what additives, preservatives and pesticides are in your food? What about the effect on the environment of the manufacturing process?
When you make your own wine you don’t need to worry! Every ingredient has been put in the wine personally so you know exactly what you’re putting in to your body.
Whether you are using fruit you have grown yourself (or been given) or you’ve been able to source locally grown organic beauties – you can now make your own organic wine at fraction of the cost of store-bought organic wine.
You can also buy organic sugar fair trade sugar from the makewine.co.nz shop. This sugar has been sustainably and ethically sourced.
Go-Ferm® Protect is approved by the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) for organic winemaking.
The yeasts makewine.co.nz sell are accepted for use in organic wines by the USDA National Organic Programme (and NZ of course). The US body tends to have some of the strictest criteria of all organic bodies.
When you make your own wine, you personally know exactly how much effect your winemaking has on the environment; fairly much not much! Which is great if you are mindful of your carbon footprint.
It is impossible to make a sulfite-free wine, because wine yeast produces sulfur dioxide (SO2) during the fermentation process. However, you can reduce and control the amount of sulphites in your wine by how much / whether you use metabisulphite in your home winemaking.
It is true that metabisulphite is an effective and safe method of sterilising both your must and equipment, but if you don’t mind taking a little bit of risk you can make wine without it. Using boiling water to sterlise your equipment and must, whilst a bit more risky in terms of your wine getting an infection, may be a worthwhile trade-off in your opinion especially if you have a sensitivity to sulphites. You can also choose to rinse your equipment that has been sterlised with metabisulphite with cooled boiled water to reduce the amount of sulphites you are adding to your wine. Also, if you are planning on drinking your wine young, the alcohol in the wine will act as a preservative, negating the need to add metabisulphite throughout the winemaking process as a preservative.
Some people use chlorine bleach to sterlise their equipment rather than metabisulphite. Also some homebrew stores sell a pink powder as a sanitiser which is a chlorinated product. This is NOT recommended. Chlorine is quite a dangerous product to have around wine. With improper use and insufficient rinsing chlorine residue may get into the wine. If it does, it could easily be converted to trichloroanisole (TCA) the major chemical found in cork taint (mustiness). For this reason, chlorine is almost never used in wineries.
So fabulous that you have a homegrown supply of fruit that you can turn in to delicious homemade wine! If you have an excess of fruit at any time; and you don't have time to start making your wine just then; simply throw the fruit in the freezer (definitely cutout any bad bits first and ideally give it a rinse). Freezing the fruit first makes the extraction process more effective.
