I'm standing, ankle-deep, in a plastic dustbin full of white grapes, purchased that morning from my local Marks & Spencer. Treading them barefoot in an attempt to separate juice from slippery skins is like trying to peel a banana with a monkey wrench. I've been stomping 15kgs of Chile's finest Thompson Seedless for 10 minutes and there's barely enough juice to fill a small saucepan. "Welcome," winemaking consultant John Worontschak of Litmus Wines tells me, "to the world of hard graft." This batch of sticky liquid is part of an attempt to make my own ethical wine, the aim being to reduce my carbon footprint yet produce something half-decent to drink. The grapes may be South American, the corks Portuguese, but everything else is UK-sourced: yeast, bentonite, sulphur dioxide tablets, fermenting buckets, thermometer, recycled bottles and my own sweat and toil. The Chilean white is one of three wines I've spent the last month fermenting and bottling in my kitchen. The other two came in kit form from www.wineworks.co.uk (a Chardonnay) and www.hopandgrape.co.uk (a red Rioja), complete with "everything the novice winemaker needs to make the process as easy and as fun as possible".

The only real difference between the kits and my foot-trodden Thompson Seedless was that the Chardonnay and the Rioja arrived as bags of grape concentrate. All I had to do was add warm water, a handful of yeast and stand back. Winemaking and wine writing are two very different disciplines. There are points where they intersect - both require an ability to taste wine and identify faults - but I can't pretend I wasn't scared as the fermentations started to gurgle after 24 hours. what type of wine goes best with roast chickenWould my house explode? buy wine online australia free deliveryWould the wines turn to vinegar?best place to buy wine in chicago Fortunately, the instructions that came with the kits were clear. best california wines of 2012

A winemaker must sterilise his equipment before use and check the temperature and sugar content (gravity) of his fermenting must on a daily basis, to monitor its progress towards alcoholic dryness. If the temperature is too warm or too cold the fermentation may get stuck, which is potentially down-the-sink time. So every morning, over a cup of coffee, I would check my three wines, stirring them with a huge plastic spoon, tasting them for sweetness and then measuring them with the hydrometer and thermometer before I recorded the data. best value wine list london"Just enjoy it," was John's advice.glass of wine tumblrI enjoyed watching my wines bubbling gently away. I enjoyed racking them from one bucket to another at the end of fermentation, using a technique that will be familiar to anyone who has ever siphoned petrol from a car.

I enjoyed mixing bentonite, adding the clay to get the wines to settle. And I enjoyed bottling the stuff. Best of all, I enjoyed the thrill of making my own wine. Would I enjoy drinking it, however? Yes, as it happens. No one would confuse my three wines - dubbed Les Champs du Sud I, II and III after the south London suburb where I live - with Château Lafite or Corton-Charlemagne, but they were all surprisingly palatable. The Rioja, to which I chose not to add oak chips, was soft and fruity, as young Tempranillo should be, the Chardonnay was round and nutty, and the Chilean Thompson Seedless was fragrant and crisp. Two of them were also cheap to make, which may explain why sales of home winemaking kits have gone "berserk", according to Richard Blackwell of Wineworks. Once you've bought a basic winemaking kit (around £40 for buckets, thermometer, hydrometer, corks and racking equipment, all of which are reusable), the actual liquid is comparatively inexpensive. The Superior Chardonnay and Selection Spanish Rioja juices cost me £38.95 and £67.95, which worked out at £1.29 and £2.26 a bottle each.

Both taste better than anything you'll find in a supermarket under £2.50. My Thompson Seedless was more expensive. The 15kgs of grapes cost £59.85, but produced only eight bottles - at the equivalent of £7.48 a go. Ethically speaking, my carbon footprint was larger, too, as the grapes were South American. My Chardonnay and Rioja, on the other hand, came from Italy and Spain via Derbyshire and Darlington. What did a professional winemaker make of my efforts? "Well, they're clean," said John, "which is a good start. Given that you were probably working with press wine, which is not the best juice, the results aren't too bad." "Drinkable, just," was Keith's verdict on Les Champs du Sud. "I'll know things are bad when I start treading grapes in my back garden. You could have saved yourself all that effort." About Best Sellers in Wine Making Kits These lists, updated hourly, contain best-selling items.The requested URL /?tag=wine-kits was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found

error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.I have a batch of peach wine and a batch of pear wine in 5 gallon glass jugs ready to bottle.  Both need to be sweetened at bottling time to bring out more of the fruit flavor.  Please explain to this rookie exactly how you back sweeten a homemade wine as you bottle it.  Do you add the sugar/water solutions to each bottle or do you add to the 5 gallon glass jugs, stir, and then bottle??  And, is plain sugar OK to sweeten with? Thanks, ready to bottle in Missouri… The first thing that needs to happen before sweetening your homemade wine is to make sure that it has completed its fermentation. This takes more than just a visual inspections. This needs to be verified with a wine hydrometer. The specific gravity reading on the hydrometer should read .998 or less. If it is not, then your wine is not yet ready to be back sweetened. Essentially, the sugar needs to be added to your wine while it is still in bulk.

Adding the sugar per wine bottle is not practical nor is it necessary. It is also important to note that you will also want to have the wine siphoned out of the fermenter and off the sediment before adding the sugar – a process called racking – otherwise unwanted sediment could be stirred up into your homemade wine. Almost everyone uses plain-ole cane sugar when back sweetening their homemade wine, but what you choose to use is open for experimentation: honey, grape concentrate, corn sugar can all be experimented with to add different subtle flavors to their fruit wines. Just remember that once the sugar is in the wine it won’t be coming back out. The sweetening process is not very forgiving in this respect. For this reason you may want to do a test batch before adding the sweetener to the rest of the wine. Maybe take a gallon of the wine off and back sweeten that first. Anytime you add a sugar to sweeten a homemade wine you will also want to add potassium sorbate to help eliminate the chance of the wine brewing again.