Fermentation
Wine making, or any other fermentation practice, can be a little intimidating when you first get started. Sure there are kits you can order, but to be quite honest, most of those are a bit expensive for what they are. If you know what you need, and don’t need it to be “wine” or “beer” specific, you can order pretty much everything right off amazon for far cheaper.
Fermentation Vessels + Air Locks
Making wine is all about fermentation. To over simplify, you mix sugar, water and yeast. The yeast eats the sugar and then poops out alcohol and farts CO2. Which means you need a container to hold the mash, but also allow the CO2 to escape. You can purchase a fermentation container, and those are really easy to clean, but they are a bit unwieldy. A glass carboy with an airlock is easier to move around, and a bit more managable.
Yeast
The simple recipe for wine is fruit, water, sugar and yeast. That said, you need wine making yeast, not bread yeast.
Misc Tools
Before you get too far down the rabbit hole looking at recipes, there are a few tools you are going to want to get. Most if not all of these are optional, but they will make your life far easier.
Filtering
Just to be upfront, this step is optional. You do not need to filter your wine, this is more a finishing step then it is anything else. That said, it will clean up the presentation, mouth feel, and round out flavors.
Sanitation
The hardest part of making wine, other than ageing, is keeping everything clean. Star San is more or less the “market leader”, but a potassium metabisulfite solution works just as well.
