primalmommy@IVILLAGE.COM on fri 14 dec 01
Hi Melinda! Keep in mind that folks made some pretty serviceable wine for thousands of years without a wine supply store! (and with unsterilized feet.) Grapes have everything you need to make wine, including the yeast. Other fruit wines do sometimes need a little this and that.
JUST SAY NO to sulfites! It's a nasty preservative. A lot of people get allergic reactions to it, like cold symptoms, even after one glass. I use good old boiling water, and for plastic tubing or big five gallon bottles, a little chlorox before the hot water -- and let it dry, covered with a bit of clean cloth. The idea is to keep wild yeast/mold/fruit flies/etc. out.
Instead of bentonite, you can use egg whites. I never did, because I am more worried about raw egg than I am about other biological bad guys.
You can get clearer wine just by waiting longer, siphoning the clear off the sediment just like a good batch of terra sig. Decant several times.
Wine that works will make enough alcohol to keep itself "sterile". Wine that doesn't will not look even remotely like something you'd want to drink. (Exception: the five gallons of ghastly but perfectly fermented marigold wine I made years ago. yuck.)
You might explore using grape leaves (wild or domestic) as a source of tannin, for fruits that require it. I know they keep canned pickles crisp better than alum (which I avoid.)
Good luck to you! Nothing like a sweet, warming elderberry port. Like jam with a kick.
Yours, Kelly in Ohio (with an afterthought: wine yeast eats sugar and excretes alcohol. They pollutes their five gallon universe until every last little yeasty dies. Next time you raise a toast, send out a hope that humans are smarter than yeast...)
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