I find it very amusing that there are people who long to know when or how long a wine matures when truthfully they just want to have a good drink of it. Many people will not simply believe that all good wines improve with age. They start making wines with urgency instead of fun and patience. People really believe that wine can be made, matured and drunk in six or seven weeks. If you are lucky, you may get fermentation done in that time and your wine cleared, but truly they can't be drinkable so young.

Yes indeed I know it very well that you will be itching to get your teeth into that wine and you cannot blame yourself for that. Many winemakers desire to taste the latest batch to be bottled. Also, keeping the homemade wine at least a year before you manage to drink it seems to be a waste of time, especially after when you had a taste of it when siphoning it. So, remember this for your own sake. When it's bottling time, put two bottles or more in the basement or someplace where they can't be reached easily. Later on, those two bottles of each batch made will soon amount up to a nice little collection.

The whole secret of building up a stock is to make numerous lots at the same time and when a jar is emptied at bottling time, start again with another lot. In this way, you will always have a few gallons fermenting, several dozen bottles for use as needed and a dozen or so slowly growing into a nice reserve. Then, when the first two bottles put away for a year or two old you may sample them. These will have become such magnificent wines in that time that your lesson will have been well and truly learned and the vow took that hence forth half of all that is bottled is going to the attic.

Another good idea is to keep some of the wine for at least five years. After five years it is better than age four and three years is better than age two. These maturing times have been trusted by expert winemakers. The question is, are you ready to keep your wines long enough to have a magnificent taste?

In addition, wines should be stored at a temperature at which they remain constant throughout the year. Rapid changes of temperature are certainly best avoided, so if you can store your wines on a stone floor or in a cupboard which has a stone floor, so much the better; if you cannot do this, store your wines where you can and fret no more.

Wild yeasts and acetic bacteria are the two enemies of successful homemade wine making. The acetic bacteria converts alcohol into acetic acid thereby turning wine to vinegar is ever present in the air. Similarly, the yeasts and spores of fungi which turn wine insipid and flat or turn it sour are also in the air. When using fresh fruit and other ingredients from the garden or from the shops, the bacteria, yeasts and fungi are also present, but fret no more because they are easily destroyed so they do no harm.

Many ingredients we use in making wine are come in sealed containers so that they will not be contaminated. In the same sense, the water that you might be using- if not sterile- contains harmful bacteria that can spoil the wine or possibly the yeast can cause distasteful ferments and these ferments could give 'off' flavors such as sour or stale.

It is not usually known that the molds on cheese, half-empty pots of meat paste and jam are often yeasts growing there for it is the yeast floating about in the air that ruins the wines that you make. So, in order to beat these souring yeasts, you must keep the fermenting wines and finished wines covered closely. Treatment of such finished wines is covered under the heading 'storing' and it is important that you cover fermenting wines.

When the prepared yeasts have been added to the liquid, the top of the jar should be covered with a piece of polythene and this should be pressed down all around by hand and a strong string tied tightly around it. This will keep airborne diseases away from the wine. Also, a good idea is to use a fermentation lock.

The whole idea of using fermentation locks is to keep airborne diseases from contaminating the wine, so make sure the bung and lock are airtight. If not, the gas leaking will prevent air from reaching the wine and slow down the outgoing stream of gas through the leakage holes.

Having fitted the lock to the bung and jar, remember to run a little sealing wax where the bungs enter the jar and where the lock enters the bung. Actually this precaution may not be necessary, but it's better to be on the safe side. You can now remove one piece of the lock and bung and insert a new bung when fermentation ceased. The wine during this process can then be put away to clear.

Flavoring world famous wines, and liqueurs can be a cumbersome job unless you use T'Noirot extracts. These extracts are scientifically mixed to give flavors equal to the world-famous liqueurs of the same name. You are guaranteed the natural taste and nothing fake or synthetic tasting in your homemade wine. It's also so easy to use.

T'Noirot extracts are potent and should not be judged by their pure scent. Anyone smelling the raw undiluted extract is likely to think that something is off or bitter. Do not pay any attention to the strength of the odor and do not taste any wine being made from the extract until it is done fermenting. The flavor will also improve immensely as it ages.

These specialty extracts contain unique blends of a variety of aromatic and bitter plants. The wine produced as a result ends up having a very unique flavor which has a lighter body to it than a wine made from all fruit. The cost can be much less expensive also.

Unlike many wine making processes, this one should be carried out over a period of ten days in a one gallon jug. Do not rack the wine into different containers. The sediment in the bottom is where much of the complexity develops with the T'Noirot extracts.

Do not divide the wine, into two half-gallon lots because half-gallon jars happen to be available. Keep it all together until fermentation is complete. After this has happened the clearer wine can be siphoned off the top into another jar and put away to clear. After is has done so, it can be bottled.

Here's a simple recipe to get you started:

Delicious Wine from T'Noirot extracts

Ingredients: 6 bottles of cherry brandy extract, 3 lb. sugar, 1 gal. water, yeast and nutrient.

Boil one-third of the sugar in half a gallon of water for two minutes; allow cooling and pouring it into the gallon jar. Then add the extract, yeast and nutrient. Cover as directed of fit fermentation lock and ferment in a warm place for ten days. Then boil another third of the sugar in a further quart of water for two minutes and when cool add this to the rest. Cover again as before or refit the lock and continue to ferment in a warm place for a further fourteen days. After this, boil the rest of the sugar in the remaining quart of water as before and when cool add the rest. Cover again or refit the lock and leave in a cool place until all fermentation has ceased.

A wonderful syrup made of excellent quality Ribena could well be added to fermenting 'must haves' to get special results. If you use Ribena in winemaking, you should reduce the amount of sugar accordingly in whichever homemade wine recipes you have in mind. The addition of one or two bottles of Ribena per gallon can make a vast improvement to the flavor and even quality of the wine.

Best of all, there is no expensive fruit to buy, no crushing, nor much to do at all. Most importantly, Ribena is treated with pectin-destroying enzyme, which means that you could boil it if you wished without fear of pectin clouding the wine. What you wish to achieve when making wine with Ribena is to lessen the amount of sugar to about three and a half pounds per gallon. In doing this, you will lessen the preservative and not likely prevent fermentation. Here are the steps to use for the addition of Ribena syrup. The water used in the procedure was first boiled and cooled naturally.

1: First two full bottles of Ribena are diluted with two times the amount of H2O (four bottles total). The yeast is added and the batch is allowed to ferment for 10 days.

Stage 2: After ten days of fermentation, two bottles of Ribena and one bottle of water were added and the mixture was allowed to ferment for a further ten days.

Step 3: Finally, after twenty days of fermentation, add two more bottles of Ribena and one bottle of water. This should be allowed to ferment until completion, usually, three months. The result is a good, round wine flavored of fresh blackcurrants.

Fermentation should be done in small-necked bottles plugged with cotton wool or fermentation locks. Racking wasn't carried out until about a month after the final addition & monthly racking followed until fermentation stopped. At a young age, this wine was nice to drink, but it improved enormously after 6 months.

Did you know a high percentage of alcohol is not everything? Indeed, most continental wines are made in the region of eight to eleven percent of alcohol. While there are wines made with the recipes based on the book, of course, wines made by the recipes in most winemaking books is a good deal stronger than the others made commercially.

It makes sense that a good percentage of alcohol ensures that wines keep well for a longer period of time. Sometimes a stray spore of yeast, either left in the wine or contaminated, will begin to reproduce and live on the sugar present. The only way to avoid this is to make a homemade wine that is extremely dry in nature. But, not all people like dry wines.

Some people prefer teir wines to be medium dry to medium sweet or even sweet. Fortunately, the wines made based on the recipes in winemaking books must keep well because they contain enough alcohol to destroy any yeast or bacteria that may reach them and provided the maximum alcohol has been reached, and if all procedures have been followed this will have been achieved.

Overall the process in making low alcohol wines calls for adding just enough sugar to make the amount of alcohol needed and to allow the wine to ferment right out. A good rule of thumb is that wine will be too dry if you use less than two and a quarter pounds of sugar in one gallon. So, if two batches are being made, double the amount of sugar called for.

So, now you should be able to take any recipe in your recipe books -except those containing dried fruit as these contain lots of sugar- and instead use one pound and fourteen ounces of sugar. Also be sure to remember that if invert sugar is being used, it contains some moisture, so for every pound of household sugar, you must use one and a quarter pounds of invert sugar.

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