How to Make Wine at Home

To make wine at home you crush ripe grapes (or open a bottle of juice or a kit), add wine yeast, let it ferment, siphon the new wine off its sediment until it is clear, then bottle it and give it time. Homemade wine needs no special talent, but it does need three things most failed batches lack: clean equipment, a hydrometer to measure sugar, and patience, because the trip from crush to first glass takes months, not days.

This guide covers how to make homemade wine the classic way, from fresh grapes, for both red and white. Every number in it (sugar, acidity, temperatures, timings) comes from university extension guides written for home winemakers, which are named and linked where they are used. If you are starting from juice, a kit, other fruit or honey, the table below sends you to the right guide; the fermentation itself works the same way.

Wine Making for Beginners: Your First Batch

If you have never made wine before, the best first batch is not the one in the long guide below. Fresh grapes mean a crusher, a press, a harvest window and a dozen decisions about sugar and acid. Wine making for beginners goes better when you pick one of three easier doors in, learn the rhythm of fermenting, racking and bottling on a small scale, and come back to grapes later.

Three Ways to Start

• Start with grape juiceOur pick for a first batch: store-bought juice, one gallon, very little gear.
• Start with a kitPre-measured ingredients and a printed schedule, so there is less to get wrong.
• Start with fruitBerries, apples or stone fruit for a country wine, once you have one batch behind you.

Our Advice: One Gallon of Juice First

Make your first batch one gallon of grape juice. It is the cheapest way to find out whether you enjoy the hobby, because a gallon of juice costs a fraction of a crate of grapes and a failed gallon costs you very little. It needs the least equipment: a one-gallon jug, an airlock, a hydrometer and a sanitizer, with no crusher and no press. And it removes the hardest variable, since juice arrives already crushed and pressed, so you spend your attention on the habits that matter in every batch: sanitizing, measuring with a hydrometer, keeping air away from the wine and waiting. Our guide to making wine from grape juice has the one-gallon recipe.

A kit is the right choice if you would rather follow a printed schedule than make decisions; our kit comparison shows what each box includes. Fruit wine is a good second batch, and the recipe collection lists every fruit we cover. Whichever door you pick, the fermentation is the same one described in the rest of this guide, so nothing you learn is wasted.

Keep a written record from the first batch. A page with the date, the starting and finishing gravity and what you added is enough, and our free wine making log and batch checklist is built for exactly that.

Choose Your Starting Point

Most people who want to make wine at home do not own a vineyard, and that is fine: the yeast does not care where the sugar came from. What changes is how much preparation the fruit needs before fermentation starts.

What You Need to Make Wine at Home

The University of Georgia Extension bulletin Winemaking at Home (Circular 717, reviewed 2013) notes that most home winemakers produce one to five gallons at a time, and the list below is sized for that. Everything that touches the wine must be food-grade: UGA warns against aluminum and copper containers altogether.

The Minimum for a Beginner

For a first one-gallon batch of juice wine you do not need the full list below. Five things cover it:

• A fermenter: a one-gallon glass jug, or a food-grade bucket with a lid for larger batches.
• An airlock and bung: lets carbon dioxide out and keeps air and fruit flies away from the wine.
• A siphon: moves the wine off its sediment without stirring it up.
• A hydrometer and test jar: tells you how much sugar you start with and when fermentation has finished.
• A sanitizer: everything that touches the wine gets sanitized first. Our guide to how to use Star San shows the no-rinse method.

Add bottles and corks when the wine is ready to bottle. The grape-specific tools in the table (crusher, press, second carboy) can wait until you move up to fresh grapes.

Equipment

Ingredients

Essential: sound, ripe wine grapes; a wine yeast; and Campden tablets or potassium metabisulfite to protect the must and the finished wine.

Optional, depending on the grapes:

• Sugar, only if the grapes were picked under-ripe. Ripe wine grapes usually need none.
• Tartaric acid, to correct grapes from a hot season that are low in acid.
• Yeast nutrient, which North Dakota State University Extension says keeps stressed yeast from producing a rotten-egg (hydrogen sulfide) smell.
• Tannin, for grapes with thin skins or for wines that taste flat.
• Golden raisins, an old trick for body; UGA also lists a small handful of minced raisins per gallon as a substitute for yeast nutrient.

You will add your own touches as you gain practice, and that is part of what makes every homemade wine different. Our full list of home winemaking equipment and supplies goes item by item.

Red or White: The One Difference That Matters

Red and white wine are made with the same steps in a different order. For red wine, the juice ferments together with the skins and seeds, which is where the color and tannin come from, and the grapes are pressed afterwards. For white wine, the grapes are pressed straight after crushing and only the juice ferments. That is why you can make a white wine from red grapes, as long as the skins come out quickly, and why white grapes fermented on their skins give the amber, tannic style called orange wine.

Sources: temperatures and aging times from Virginia Cooperative Extension’s Wine Making for the Home Gardener (HORT-213), skin contact from UGA and Virginia Tech, punching down from UGA, harvest pH from Ohio State University Extension’s Determining Grape Maturity and Fruit Sampling (HYG-1436). The steps below follow a red wine; the white wine changes are in the section after them.

How to Make Red Wine from Grapes, Step by Step

These 13 steps take you from a crate of grapes to a corked bottle. Keep a notebook as you go: the date, the gravity and what you added at each step. It is the only way to repeat a good batch or fix a disappointing one.

1. Pick or Buy Ripe Wine Grapes

The grapes decide the wine. Wine grape varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah (Shiraz) or Pinot Noir have the sugar, acidity and thick skins that make a balanced red; table grapes are bred for eating and usually make a thinner wine. If you grow your own, Penn State Extension’s guide to assessing grape maturity puts desirable sugar at 18 to 24 °Brix, depending on variety and style, and suggests tasting berries and checking the seeds, which turn from green to brown as they mature. Ohio State adds that titratable acidity generally falls between 0.6 and 0.8 grams per 100 ml at harvest. Our guide on when to harvest grapes for wine explains how to sample.

Pick by hand to keep the berries whole, then sort: remove leaves, unripe bunches and anything rotten or moldy. UGA is blunt about it: over-ripe or bruised fruit has begun to decay even when you cannot see it, and it gives the wine a disagreeable flavor. If you are buying grapes, use the yield table further down to work out how many pounds you need.

2. Clean and Sanitize Everything

Every failed batch has a weak link, and it is usually hygiene. NDSU’s Getting Started With Home Winemaking (FN1638) says to wash everything that touches the juice, rinse it thoroughly with hot water and then sanitize it. Use a no-rinse sanitizer or a sulfite solution; Virginia Tech’s HORT-213 gives four Campden tablets per quart of water or 1/4 teaspoon of potassium metabisulfite powder per quart, and advises against chlorine bleach, which can leave an unpleasant taste.

3. Crush and Destem

Crushing breaks the skins so the yeast can reach the juice. A hand-cranked crusher is the quickest way; for a few pounds a potato masher, a rolling pin or clean feet work too. Take out as many stems as you can, by hand or with a destemmer, because stems give a harsh, green taste to the wine. Try not to crack the seeds, which are bitter.

What you have now, juice, pulp, skins and seeds together, is called the must. Move it into the primary fermenter and leave about a third of the space empty: the foam and the cap of skins that rise during fermentation need room.

4. Add Sulfite

Sulfite protects the must from spoilage bacteria and wild yeast, and slows browning. NDSU recommends adding potassium metabisulfite at 50 parts per million of sulfur dioxide, or one Campden tablet per gallon of must, crushed and dissolved in a little juice. Then wait before adding the yeast so the free sulfite can fade: UGA waits four hours, while NDSU and the Campden tablet maker wait 24 hours. Our sulfite calculator converts any dose into grams of powder or tablets, and the Campden tablet guide explains when to use each.

Handle the powder with care: potassium metabisulfite releases sulfur dioxide, which irritates the eyes and lungs, so do not lean over the bucket while you stir it in.

5. Measure the Sugar and Acid

Strain a sample into the test jar and float the hydrometer. A reading around 1.090 is the usual target: Virginia Tech says it gives about 12% alcohol, and UGA’s rule of thumb is that fermented sugar yields about half its amount as alcohol, so must at 22% sugar makes a wine of about 11%. Ripe wine grapes often land there on their own, and then you add nothing. If the reading is low, NDSU’s figure is that 11 grams of sugar per liter of must raise the gravity by 0.004 (one degree Brix); add it a little at a time, dissolved in some of the juice, and measure again. Our sugar calculator does the arithmetic, and the hydrometer guide covers temperature correction.

Acidity is the other half of balance. If you can, test the pH: Ohio State gives 3.3 to 3.5 for red grapes at harvest and 3.1 to 3.3 for white. Grapes from a hot region or a hot year tend to run high in pH and low in acid. The safe way to correct them is to work on a sample first: add a measured amount of tartaric acid to one gallon (about 4 liters) of juice, test again, and once the sample tastes and measures right, multiply that amount for the whole batch. Adjust before fermentation; correcting the finished wine is harder.

6. Add the Yeast and Nutrient

Use a true wine yeast. Clemson Cooperative Extension’s Basics of Home Winemaking warns that bread, beer and cider yeasts cannot tolerate the alcohol in wine and die before fermentation is complete, leaving it sweet and weak. A red strain such as Lalvin RC-212 (64 to 86°F, up to 16% alcohol, per Lallemand) suits most red grapes; a single 5 g sachet is rated for 4.5 to 23 liters, so one covers a five-gallon batch. Rehydrate it as the packet says, stir it in, and add yeast nutrient at the dose on its label. Our wine yeast guide matches strains to grape varieties.

Wild Yeast, Cultured Yeast or Both

You can also skip the packet and let the yeast that lives on the grapes and in the winery do the work. Wild fermentation gives a wine character you cannot get any other way, but it is unpredictable: you do not know which strains are present, and a weak one can stall halfway and leave a stuck, sweet wine. It is more likely to succeed in the countryside and in regions with a long history of winemaking than in a city apartment.

Wild yeast works best where it is plentiful and strong enough to finish the job, which is why it suits vineyard country better than a city kitchen. If you try it, watch the gravity closely and be ready to rescue a slow ferment with nutrient or a packet of cultured yeast; our stuck fermentation guide shows how.

Cultured yeast is the reliable route: you know the strain, its temperature range and how much alcohol it tolerates. Many winemakers hedge by splitting the must into two vessels, one left to wild yeast and one inoculated with a cultured strain. If the wild half ferments well, you blend the two for a wine with more character; if it fails, you still have a sound wine from the other. More on that route in our guide to making wine without added yeast.

7. Ferment on the Skins and Punch Down the Cap

Cover the bucket with its loose lid or a double layer of cloth to keep out fruit flies, which carry the bacteria that turn wine into vinegar, and keep it somewhere warm and steady. UGA ferments red must at 60 to 70°F and says fermentation should begin within 24 hours; NDSU allows 65 to 80°F and notes that warmer, faster fermentation is what reds want.

Within a day or two the skins float up and form a thick cap. Push it back down into the juice and stir it through at least twice a day, as UGA recommends; this is where the color and tannin come out, and it keeps the cap from drying out and spoiling. Any clean, food-safe tool works, and a wooden stick with a flat board fixed to the end is easy to make yourself.

Leave the wine on the skins for 3 to 7 days (UGA) or up to 10 (Virginia Tech). A shorter time gives a lighter, fruitier red; the full time, until fermentation starts to slow, gives a darker, richer and more tannic one. NDSU’s signal to move on is a gravity of about 1.020 to 1.030.

8. Press the Grapes

Scoop or pour off the free-run wine first, then load the remaining skins into the press or a straining bag and squeeze them slowly. UGA advises not to press so hard that pulp is forced through the cloth. Funnel everything into the carboy, but only up to the shoulders for now: the wine is still fermenting and needs some room. Our wine press guide compares basket presses by size.

9. Let Fermentation Finish Under an Airlock

Fit the bung and an airlock filled with sanitizer solution; Clemson points out that plain water can grow mold and vodka evaporates too quickly. Keep the carboy in a dark place at a steady temperature. Fermentation continues more quietly for several weeks: UGA expects about a month, and four to eight weeks is common. The yeast settles to the bottom as a creamy layer called the lees.

Do not trust the airlock to tell you when it is over. Take hydrometer readings a few days apart: fermentation is finished when the gravity stays the same across three days, as Clemson puts it. Clemson’s typical final gravity is 0.999 to 1.005, and NDSU notes that a fully dry wine can read as low as 0.990. If the gravity stops well above that, see our guide to how long wine takes to ferment before you assume it is done.

10. Rack the Wine Off Its Sediment

Racking means siphoning the clear wine into a clean carboy and leaving the lees behind, because Clemson notes that the lees are bitter and make a cloudy, unpleasant wine. UGA gets the best flow with the full carboy about 18 inches above the empty one. On this first racking it lets the wine splash slightly, since the last of the yeast uses that oxygen to finish; from then on, keep the end of the hose under the surface.

Top the new carboy up to within an inch or two of the bung with a similar wine, or with water, which Virginia Tech says is unlikely to dilute the wine by more than about 1%. Air in the headspace is the fastest route to oxidized, browning wine. Rack again every one to two months while sediment keeps forming; UGA says some wines need three or four rackings before they are clear. Add one crushed Campden tablet at every other racking, as NDSU and Virginia Tech advise. The full method is in our guide on how to rack wine.

11. Clear and Stabilize

A sound wine of good strength usually clears by itself with time and racking. If it does not, a fining agent such as bentonite or gelatin will help, and UGA adds that chilling grape wine to 30 to 40°F drops potassium bitartrate crystals, the harmless glassy grains that otherwise turn up in the bottle. Our guides to clearing wine and degassing wine cover the options.

If you plan to sweeten the wine, stabilize it first. Potassium sorbate stops the surviving yeast from multiplying; Northern Brewer’s directions are half a teaspoon per gallon, used together with sulfite. Clemson warns that wine that has not been stabilized can start fermenting again in storage and shatter the bottles. A dry wine that has finished fermenting does not need sorbate. See how to backsweeten wine for the method.

12. Bottle and Cork

Bottle only when the wine is clear, has stopped dropping sediment and reads the same on the hydrometer week after week. UGA adds sulfite just before bottling (one Campden tablet or 1/8 teaspoon of potassium metabisulfite for every three gallons) and siphons without splashing to avoid oxidation. Use new corks, never old ones: NDSU says No. 9 corks fit most U.S. bottles, while some imported bottles need No. 8. Make sure the corks match your bottle necks before you buy a bag of a hundred. Our guide to wine bottles for homemade wine covers sizes and neck finishes, and the wine making kits compare which boxes include a corker.

Stand the corked bottles upright for a few days so the corks expand and seal (NDSU), then store them on their sides so the corks stay moist. Label each bottle with the wine and the date. Step-by-step help is in our guide to bottling and corking wine.

13. Age It, Then Enjoy It

Wine can technically be drunk at bottling, but it improves with time. NDSU explains that wine goes through bottle shock for three weeks or more after bottling and recommends at least two months of aging, with a year being better; UGA also suggests about a year for the best clarity and flavor. Store the bottles somewhere dark and steady, ideally 50 to 60°F (Virginia Tech). Reds gain the most from time, as their tannins soften. Our guide to how long homemade wine lasts covers storage in detail.

When you finally open a bottle, give a red a little time in the glass to breathe, and hold the glass by the stem so your hand does not warm the wine. Then share it: there is nothing quite like pouring your own wine for friends and family.

How to Make White Wine at Home

White wine follows the same steps with two changes: the grapes are pressed before fermentation, and the juice ferments cooler.

1. Crush and press straight away. UGA’s instruction for white wine is to separate the juice from the skins and pulp immediately and transfer it to the secondary fermenter. Sulfite the juice as in step 4.
2. Ferment the juice only. Measure and adjust sugar and acid, add a white wine yeast and nutrient, and fit an airlock. There is no cap to punch down.
3. Keep it cool. Virginia Tech ferments whites at 50 to 60°F, and NDSU notes that cooler fermentation keeps more of the delicate, fruity aromas. Check that your yeast is rated for the temperature.
4. Rack, clear and stabilize exactly as for red, then bottle.
5. Age for less time. Virginia Tech suggests at least six months in bulk for whites, against nine to twelve for reds.

Thin-skinned white grapes contain little tannin. UGA counts white wines among those lacking it, while Virginia Tech cautions that added tannin can easily overwhelm the fruit flavor in a white, so add it sparingly if at all.

Red and White Wine: The Steps Side by Side

If you only remember one thing from this guide, make it this order of operations:

The swap between pressing and fermenting is the whole difference. Red grapes such as Pinot Noir share their DNA with white varieties such as Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris, and the juice of most red grapes is clear; the color is in the skins.

How Much Wine Do You Get from Grapes?

Grapes give up their juice unevenly, and how hard you press changes the yield, but there is a reliable planning number. Cornell University’s enology extension (Chris Gerling, “Grapes 101: Conversion Factors”, 2011) uses 150 gallons of wine per ton of grapes, with a normal range of 120 to 180 gallons. That works out to about 13 pounds of grapes per gallon of wine, or roughly 2.6 pounds per 750 ml bottle.

Figures use the 150 gallons per ton planning number. Expect less if you press lightly or lose wine to the lees when racking, and buy a little extra fruit so you have something to top up the carboy with.

For your own batch size, or for fruit other than grapes, use the calculator below.

The same tool has its own page, the grape and fruit calculator, which you can bookmark for the next harvest.

How Long Does It Take to Make Wine?

Longer than most beginners expect. The active part takes a few weeks; the waiting takes months.

Add those up and a white wine from grapes is typically ready six to nine months after the crush, a red closer to a year, and both keep improving after that. Kits and juice wines are faster; see how long wine takes to ferment for each type.

Common Mistakes When Making Wine at Home

• Using bread yeast. It gives up before the sugar is gone; Clemson’s advice is to use wine yeast only.
• Skipping sanitation. Spoilage bacteria and wild yeast ride in on unwashed tools, and vinegar flies find uncovered buckets quickly.
• Fermenting in the wrong container. Aluminum and copper are out (UGA), and plastic is for the first week or two, not for months of aging.
• Guessing instead of measuring. Without a hydrometer you do not know the alcohol you are heading for or when fermentation has really ended.
• Leaving air in the carboy. Top up after every racking; oxygen is the main cause of flat, brown wine.
• Bottling too early. Wine that is still fermenting builds pressure that can push corks or burst bottles.
• Sweetening without stabilizing. Added sugar plus live yeast equals a second fermentation in the bottle.
• Improvising “pruno.” Fruit, sugar and bread yeast fermented in a bag is not a shortcut to wine. Read what it really is in our guide to pruno, or prison wine, and follow a real recipe instead.

If something does go wrong, our wine faults guide helps you identify it by smell and look.

Is It Legal to Make Wine at Home?

In the United States, yes, for personal use. The federal rule, 27 CFR 24.75, lets any adult make up to 100 gallons a year in a one-adult household, or 200 gallons where two or more adults live, without paying tax. The wine cannot be sold, and state or local rules can be stricter. Our homemade wine guide covers the legal and safety questions in more detail.

Winemaking Terms Used in This Guide

Keep a Log of Every Batch

The one habit that separates the winemakers who improve from the ones who repeat their mistakes is a written record. Our free wine making log and batch checklist is a two-page printable PDF with the steps in order and a table for your gravity readings. Enter your email below and we will send it to you.

How to Make Wine at Home: FAQ