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Where would I buy Campden tablets, pectic enzyme or potassium metabisulfite? Do you even use those? How about acid blends? I somehow don't recall seeing these things at the grocery store, and I worry that the liquor store (if it even carries them) might have a 21 age limit on them.
Keller is a Very Serious Dude when it comes to winemaking, and makes wines that Win Competitions and Tour The World. If you just want to kick around with winemaking for a bit, you can get away with far less... rigorous... procedures.
First: kit wines come with everything you need except the equipment I listed above. So don't worry about the chemistry if you're making a kit, it's all there already.
And I DO recommend starting with a kit, even if it's just a cheap white kit, because it sort of walks you through the what-to-do-at-what-stage thing in practice. A cheap CAD$40 kit makes decent "party wine." The-more-you-drink-the-better-it-gets wine.
(as a side note, the great justifier in investing in winemaking gear is amortizing the costs. Your first wine works out to about $8 a bottle, because you're paying back the equipment costs, but from then on it's $5 a bottle or less, baby)
Actually ANSWERING the questions... I have all these things, and the only thing I use with regularity is the potassium metabisufite to kill leftover yeast once the fermentation cycle is through.
Camden tablets are used to purify things before you start fermenting them -- essentially it's like sterilizing your must before you introduce the yeast. But I find if I boil everything first, then add my yeast as soon as it's cooled down, it usually works out okay.
Pectic enzyme is a clearing agent, which is important if you want your wine to come out crystal clear like the storebought stuff. If you don't mind a bit of murk in your glass, it's unnecessary.
You don't even need to add potassium meta at the end to terminate leftover yeast, but you're rolling the dice if you don't... if there's a bit of yeast still propagating in the bottle, and it "wakes up" and adapts to the environment and starts eating sugars and farting gas, you could have blown corks, explosions or worse.
I try to keep my whole process chemical-free whenever possible, in part because I have some friends who are very chem-sensitive. You take a few more risks that way, but they aren't huge risks.
Blueberry juice (and wine) is red, which surprised the hell out of me. I tried making a blueberry a few years ago, but it turned out kind of bitter. I had to add sugar at the end of the process to get it palatable, but it didn't wow me. Mind you, I only tried once, and I was making it up as I went along, so don't take my example as gospel.
I can't see why anyone wouldn't sell to anyone of any age in a winemaking shop. That's like going to a steel mill and they won't sell you a pipe because you could make a pipe bomb. Frankly, I think anyone mature enough to go through the entire six-week process of winemaking, and the six months of aging before the wine gets DECENT, is mature enough to monitor their own liquor intake. |
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