 Welcome to today's Wednesday weekly webinar. This is number five of ten webinars that we're doing this spring. My name is Julie Gardin Robinson and I'm a food and nutrition specialist here on campus at NDSU. And our speaker today is going to be Steve Sageser and he's a horticulture agent in Grand Forks County. And I'll tell you a little bit more about Steve in a couple minutes, but first I have some logistics I'd like to share. Our upcoming webinars, and I certainly hope you'll join them, include the following. Next week we'll hear from Holly Mobby, who's the director of the Entrepreneurial Center for Horticulture at Dakota College at Botno, and she'll be talking about herbs. On the 5th of April, Kim Koch, who's the feed production manager at the Northern Crops Institute, will be talking more about FISMA. So that's the Food Safety Modernization Act. Following that, we'll hear from Esther McGinnis with an update on spotted wing drosophila in North Dakota. And rounding out this year's series will be Dr. Cliff Hall, who's a professor of plant sciences, food science in particular, and he's going to be talking about canning, low and high acid foods. And finally, last but not least, we'll hear from Todd Weinman, who's a horticulture agent, and he'll be talking about introducing youth to gardening. So lots of fun coming up. I think there's a lot to be learned and you'll be hearing from some of the experts that we have on campus and our friends off campus. So some logistics. I think we've all figured this out. But if you have questions along the way, feel free to type your question into the chat pod, and I'll keep an eye on that in case Steve doesn't notice that there's a question while he's talking. And we might ask you to raise your hand periodically. That's how I test if you can hear us. At the end of the webinar, we'll leave a little time or as much time as Steve has for you to ask questions. And here's a plea for me. This was all sponsored by a grant. So we will have a short survey that will be emailed directly to you. It'll take you two minutes. I promise it won't take you very long, but we use that data in grant reports. And it also helps us get future funding. So hopefully we can continue to offer seminars like this and to develop materials like you will find on our field of fork website. And if you haven't visited our field of fork website, I encourage you to do so. We're always adding new materials. There are things that you want to use for an event if you happen to be managing a farmer's market, for example, teaching a class, feel free to use anything that you find on that website that's spent for your use. And we've added things like a harvesting guide and a weed guide and things like that that hopefully will help you in your communities or if you're an instructor, go ahead and use it how you wish. So now it is my pleasure to introduce Steve Sagacer. As I mentioned, he's an extension agent in Grand Forks County and his specialty is horticulture. Steve teaches educational programs for clients about trees, shrubs, lawns, gardens, fruit trees, and also landscaping. And he also helps his clients with plant tests and disease identification. Steve and I work directly on a home winemaking guide along with our retired colleague, Ron Smith. So you should have access if you go to the website to that winemaking guide. And that kind of goes along with the presentation that you'll be hearing. Now I have some fun facts about Steve that he just shared with me. Steve likes to make wine. So this is great. He has 16 kinds of wine currently going in his basement, I believe. And in his lifetime of winemaking, he has made over 200 batches and more than 50 kinds. So he's an expert in this area and I'm really happy that he had time to do this, especially when he's in the middle of teaching a workshop out in Bismarck. So thanks for being here, Steve. And I'm going to get off and let you have it. Oh, Julie, thank you. It's my pleasure. I'm glad to be here. And I hope we have some interested people at least learning about winemaking. But if you even aren't interested in learning about winemaking, this will help you understand or have a greater appreciation of wine even as you're sampling and enjoying that wonderful, bountiful gift that we get every fall from the fruits and vegetables of our types of produce that we produce here in our region. And so again, thank you for having me, Julie. I'm really looking forward to sharing some of my expertise. And folks, I'll do my best to answer questions in the chat pod, but I'll be honest with you. I'm not a multitasker, so if it gets a little bit delayed from the time that you asked your question and I get it answered, I'll do my best to get back to you. But at the very end, I promise what I'll do is I'll put in my email address, and I'd love to visit with you some more if you have additional questions or maybe a follow-up question. So I'll put my email address in. And I correspond with a lot of folks through email about not only winemaking and other horticulture questions as well, but in this particular case, we'll talk about winemaking. So here we go. Now, according to my two granddaughters who helped me sort through grapes on this particular day, they think grapes are the perfect fruit for making wine. And I couldn't agree more. Grapes are the perfect fruit for making wine because they're a well-balanced fruit. They've got, for the most part, the right amount of sugar, the right amount of acids, and they'll produce the right amount of juice for you. Now that said, it doesn't mean that you're going to only be able to make good, enjoyable, tasty wine out of grapes. Here in North Dakota, we maybe might have a little bit more difficulty growing grapes, but I can talk to you about that as well. But the important thing about making a good quality wine is that you have to use good quality fruit. It has to be good. If you've got some fruit that's starting to degrade in quality, let's say that it's starting to spoil, maybe it's insect infested or diseased, you're not going to want to... Would you eat that? No. And that's the question to ask yourself. If you're not willing to eat it, then it's not going to make good wine. So you can mess up a batch of wine even with good quality fruit, and one of my favorite quotes is from an individual named Allison Crowe. She writes an article for a monthly publication called Wine Maker Magazine, and her quote, and you can probably see that in your handout. She says, it all starts with the raw material. Your wine will only be as good as your starting material. It's possible to make good wine out of great fruit, but you can't make great wine out of mediocre fruit or even worse than that. So that's the important thing is that you make sure that you're using good quality fruit. Then you need to make sure that you're working in a clean working area. A bad, unclean working area is going to give you bad wine. So wherever you're making your wine out, it needs to be a clean working area. I conned my wife into letting me take a picture of her, and believe me, this is quite natural for her when she tastes bad wine. She'll make a face like this, and that's the last kind of a look that you want on the face of somebody that you've shared a little bit of your wine with. Now, this is sort of a made up picture, but I have seen that face on her in the past. Hopefully it wasn't from any wine that I made, but I have seen that face. So you want to be working in a clean working area. So that's not going to guarantee that you'll get good wine, but if you start out in a messy, dirty area where there are contaminants, I can almost guarantee your wine is going to be contaminated right from the beginning. So if you start out with a good clean working area, then the chances are that you'll end up with something that's more pleasant. It'll be hopefully a good wine, and it just increases your chances for making that high quality, fun-tasting, enjoyable drink that you want to make. So a clean working area is really important. Now let's talk about sanitation in your home winery. It's really important. I can't stress enough, especially for beginning winemakers. The importance of making sure that everything is sanitized, washed and sanitized completely. Suffice it to say that everything the wine will touch needs to be sanitized. So my cleaning regime is to pre-rinse everything, even if it's a brand new piece of equipment that I've purchased. Everything needs to at least be pre-rinced. And then using detergent, if necessary, scrub off any particles or anything that's on the surfaces, whether it's on the inside of a container. Maybe it's your stirring spoon. It could be a tool that you use to punch down the fruit when it's actually fermenting. Everything needs to be scrubbed with detergent if there are particles on it. You don't have to use detergent if you can look with your eyes and see that there's not any particles on it. But if there are, you need to use detergent. Then rinse everything off and then using a sanitizing solution spray down everything with sanitizer and then rinse that solution off. Then you're ready to go ahead and start making your wine. Now, a product that you need to get familiar with, and you'll probably hear this in winemaking circles or for people who are making wine, they talk about Camden tablets. Camden tablets look like little aspirins, they're about the size of an aspirin, and you can use those if you'd like to. But if you're going to mix up a sanitizing solution out of Camden tablets, it's going to be rather costly. What I do is I buy potassium metabasulfite, which is the same ingredient that's in Camden tablets. There are two types of Camden tablets. One is sodium metabasulfite, and the other one is potassium metabasulfite. Personally, I prefer not to use sodium metabasulfite. Everything I use is potassium metabasulfite. We'll talk a lot more about potassium metabasulfite, but it's used as a wine stabilizer, and it's also used as a sanitizer. What's really nice about it is that it forms a sulfur dioxide gas, and that will essentially eliminate most wild microorganisms from growing. It's also an antioxidant, so it protects the color in your wine and keeps it from becoming oxygenated. So get used to that term of potassium metabasulfite. Some people shorten it to, they'll call it KbMSO, or KbMSO4, or Kmeta, or something like that, but it's all pretty much the same thing. Camden tablets and potassium metabasulfite. I keep a spray bottle around with that potassium metabasulfite sanitizing solution in it, and so I'll spritz down anything that I'm going to use, any kind of a tool that I'm going to use in my wine, whether it's already become wine or whether it's in the process of fermenting. And you can pick these little spray bottles up at a place like a dollar store. They don't last forever because the solution tends to be a little acidic, and those plastic parts inside of the spray bottle, they do tend to wear out, so you'll probably have to replace these little spray bottles every three to six months or so. But they are really quite handy for making sure that you can get everything sanitized properly. So that's just me there spritzing down or spraying down the sides and the end of my stirring spoon. So a basic equipment list. This should be in your handout, and I'll show you a picture of it if you don't want to write this down, but you should at least have a one gallon container for your sanitizer solution. The really nice thing about the sanitizing solution, the KbMSO4, that potassium metabasulfite, is that you can use it multiple times. You don't just use it once and then throw it away. Keep it in an airtight container, and you can use an old milk jug that you've washed out completely and rinsed out thoroughly, and you can store it in there and just screw the cap down. The way I look at it, if you take a good sniff of it and it burns your nostrils and you don't want a second sniff, it's still viable. It's still potent enough to be a sanitizer solution. But you also want that spray bottle that I just showed you a picture of for spritzing the sanitizing solution on your different implements and tools. You'll need some of the basic measuring containers, and you're going to have these types of containers in your kitchen anyway. Now, for your primary fermentation, we just call this the primary or the primary fermenter. I would start out with the minimum of a five gallon bucket if you're making a small batch. But let's say that you're making a six gallon batch. You're going to need about an eight gallon bucket. So whatever size batch of wine you're making, you should have a bucket or a container that's at least a third larger than whatever that size of batch is. That's because when you get some active fermentation, you get a lot of bubbling and other things taking place. And if you are trying to make a five gallon batch in a five gallon container, I guarantee you you will have a mess on your floor. It will boil over. You'll also, oh, I want to back up a little bit on the bucket. You don't need to buy an expensive bucket. You can go to Menards or Lowes or your local hardware store. If you buy a paint bucket, whatever kind it is, just make sure that you tip it over and look at the bottom of it. And there will be a little triangle there, and it will say HDPE. That should say HDPE 2 or 3. I think 3 is going to be better than 2. And that just essentially the HDPE means high density polyethylene. And if it's HDPE 3, then you know for certain that it's food grade. So it doesn't have to be an expensive bucket. You can get those buckets for anywhere from $5 to $6. You'll also need a glass or a plastic carboy. And essentially that's just a glass jug. You can use a plastic one as well. There are some really good ones that are available. The nice thing about those is that they don't break if you set them down a little bit hard onto a hard surface. I have all of mine as of right now are glass except for the one exception I have a plastic one. But I have about, I would guess, 40 or 50 of these. And you'll need a stirring spoon. That can be metal or plastic. And again, that's one of those devices that you're going to need to sanitize every time you put it into your wine or into your must. Your must is the material. That's the juice and all of your additives before it becomes wine. Then you'll also need a racking cane and some plastic tubing attached to it. You'll need a hydrometer. Your hydrometer basically that's like, that's as important to the winemaker as the compass is to the mariner. It tells you first of all where you've been and where you're going. So you need that. It looks like kind of a odd glass thermometer. And I'll show you a picture of it in a minute. You also should have planned to have some pH strips or some sort of a pH meter which is even better to measure the pH of the wine. And this is important before you even start. Because if you don't have your pH in the proper range before you start making your wine, it's a little bit, quite a bit more difficult to adjust the pH later on. And every time you make an addition or an adjustment after the wine is made, it's never as simple as just making that adjustment. Other things take place every time you change something within the wine. You will need an airlock for your car boy. And basically what the airlock does, you can purchase the three piece airlock. They're about a dollar, dollar and a half a piece. Or you can get the S shaped airlock. And in either case, they both do the same thing. I prefer the S shaped one, but I still have just as many of the three piece ones, airlocks. But what they do essentially is they keep, they allow the gases out of the car boy or out of the fermenter to escape, but they don't allow any oxygen to get back into your wine. You'll need a wine thief and you probably don't really realize what a wine thief is, but I'm going to show you some pictures of them. But they're primarily just used for taking samples. A good heavy duty bottle brush and then a corker for putting corks in your new wine. So this is a home winemaking kit. I just assembled these parts together and took a photo. But this is essentially what you will get if you go to a place like Midwest Supplies or M&M winemaking supplies or some place like that, Northern Brewer. They sell home winemaking kits. And with that, you would get the fermenting bucket, which is the container on the left. You would get a glass car boy, which is the container on the right. And you would get some corks. You'd get a stirring spoon, a bottle brush. That L shaped bottle brush is for scrubbing out the inside of your six gallon car boy. You'd also get a racking tube. And it's kind of difficult to pick it out, but it is in there. Basically, it's a plastic tube with the L shaped bend in it. And then that is what the racking, the tubing, the plastic tubing is attached to. And I'll show you how that works down the road as we get further along here. Then you'll also need a corker for putting the corks into your wine bottles. And that in the lower right hand corner is a handheld corker. And we'll talk more about corkers too. I prefer not to use the handheld corkers. I think they are, I won't call them a death trap, but you can spill wine quite easily with them when you're trying to put a cork in if you're not doing it properly. So just a little bit on home wine making kits. And then you'll also need a recipe book, some sort of a recipe handbook. And you don't have to purchase this one. That is only three or four dollars. But you can also pick up a lot of really good wine making recipes from wine making sites on the Internet. I think it's really important that you keep good records. You know, if you make just one batch of wine a year, let's say it turns out really well. And I know it will if you take some time. How are you going to replicate that batch or make another one just like it if you don't write down everything that you did? Whether it's additions like acid additions, or whether it's when you racked it, or if you added additional sugar, or how many pounds of sugar the two added. Anything, also the dates need to be put down there. Anything that you've done to that batch of wine from start to finish until a time it goes into the bottle, you need to make a record of that. Keep a good record book or a good log sheet. That way, I'm not saying you can perfectly duplicate that batch of wine, but you'll be a lot closer to being able to make it similar to the first one if you do keep good records. One thing about it is that fruit changes from one year to the next. And that's where that old winemaking adage comes from that such and such year was a good year and the next year wasn't a good year. That's because the fruit changes from one year to the next. And some years it'll be much higher in sugar and flavor compounds than it is other years. So you do your best and try to replicate a batch, but it won't always be the same. So let's talk about getting the juice out of your grapes, or it could be your apples, it could be your choke cherries. It could be any kind of fruit. And there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. This is an easy way to do it. In this particular, I'm just using a 4x4 to crush up some grapes. And what you see on the right there is basically what we would call must. It's ready to become wine, but it's the fruit pulp along with the juice and everything else that you're planning to add to it. And that's the must that we're going to turn into wine. Now, when I do grapes, I'll probably do anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 pounds of grapes at a time. And you know what? When I used to crush grapes by hand, it would take me all week long to crush in these stem 300 pounds. And both my wife and I were really tired of it by the time that we got to that, that got that through those full 300 pounds. With this machine here, we can do basically 1,500 pounds in about an hour and a half. And what it does is it crushes the fruit and separates the stems from the fruit. They go out to the side. And essentially, you've got everything you need that's ready to be turned into wine, right in one fell swoop. So at some point you may decide you want to get together with a friend or two or maybe borrow or rent one of these machines. But that's one extreme. And the other extreme is to just go ahead and do it by hand. And that works just as good. So when you're starting out, you can do something like this. When you get a little further along, if you're ready to make multiple batches a year, then you can move up to something like this. Now, whether you're crushing your fruit by hand or you're crushing it with a machine, you need to clean the slate before you start to turn that fruit juicing pulp into wine. And what I mean by clearing the slate or cleaning it up is that it's a really good idea. There are always going to be wild microorganisms on the fruit. And if you don't kill those or at least neutralize them, you don't know what direction your wine is going to go. Now, there are individuals who say, oh, I like to let nature take its course and make a natural batch of wine. If you're an accomplished winemaker and you want to take those risks, go for it. But you may or may not have good success. About 50% of the time, you'll have a batch of wine that would curl up your nose and make you frown when you sift it. You don't want to do that. This is too much time and energy put into making a good batch of wine. So let's do it right. So what I suggest doing is adding potassium metabysulfite as a slate clearing tool. So basically, what you're shooting for is about 50 parts per million. 50 parts per million would be the equivalent of about one to two camden tablets in a five or six gallon batch of wine. Or it would be a quarter teaspoon of potassium metabysulfite in a five or six gallon batch of must. So sprinkle that. And that's all I'm doing right here. Mix it up good. Put a cover over that loosely so that it can, gases can escape. And don't touch it for 24 hours. You don't want to add yeast right away. Now this is that hydrometer that I was talking about. And this measures the starting specific gravity. And that's basically, all that means is that it tells you what the sugar content is in your batch of wine before you start. And so you probably are asking, why is it important to know what the sugar content is? It's important to know what the sugar content is in order to be able to tell what the alcohol by volume will be when the wine is finished. Because wine consume the, yeast consume the sugar. And then in the process of eating the sugar, they convert it to alcohol. So if you know how much sugar is there to begin with, and whatever residual sugar is left, that will tell you how much sugar has been converted into alcohol. And you'll be able to have an idea if you've got a, wine that has an alcohol volume of maybe 11% or maybe 13.5%. We'll talk about a formula for doing this, but on the left-hand side of this picture, it shows a container holding the juice before it's turned into wine. This is your must. And the individual there is taking a reading with a hydrometer. And you write that reading down. It should be somewhere between 1.075 to 1.095. And if you're reading on your hydrometer, it's right in that range there. And that's a good starting point. You don't want it much higher than that. 1.095, and you don't want it much lower than that, 1.075. Some other common ingredients you're going to need, obviously, are your juice. That's what becomes the wine. But most likely, if you're making wine out of apples or cherries or strawberries or raspberries, any fruit other than grapes, you're probably going to have to add some sugar. And what I would suggest doing is, first of all, doing a hydrometer reading, like I just showed you with this device here. And then once you've done that, then you will know how much sugar to add. And there are lots of different formulas that will tell you how much sugar to add per gallon of must to get to a certain level. Or you can just start adding sugar a little bit at a time and remeasuring. And when you get to about where you want it to be between 1.075 to 1.095, then you stop. Now, you'll also want some tannin. And we'll talk about tannin's purpose in just a second. You'll need some acid in the form of titeric acid or better yet, acid blend. Although titeric acid works really nice. Because you need to get the pH, the acid level, where it needs to be in order for the wine to taste like it's wine. So it doesn't taste flat. And the acid level also needs to be at the right range, the correct range in order to protect the wine over the life of it. Some pectic enzyme is important. And you can purchase any of these at a winemaking supply store. A lot of them you can purchase right in your local grocery store. But more often than not, you'll have to go to a winemaking supply store. But the reason that pectic enzyme is important is a lot of fruits, apples, peaches, pears, plums. They have a high degree of pectin in them. And that is fine. It doesn't hurt the wine. But it makes the wine, it makes it difficult for the wine to be clarified and look like wine. Otherwise, it could just look like the fruit juice. So it'll be quality and murky. So the pectic enzyme breaks that pectin down and helps to settle out and gives you a much nicer looking wine. Bentonite is another type of a clearing agent. And that's a type of clay. And we'll talk about how to use that also. The Camden tablets we've already mentioned. But yeast, energizer, or nutrient. I don't want you to miss, if you remember anything, about these ingredients. So we'll cover the yeast energizer. Yeast energizer is basically a fertilizer for the yeast. And if you don't use that, you'll have some problems. The yeast will become stressed. And the wine and the yeast, the wine and the must, everything that's there will start to smell like rotten eggs. So potassium sorbate, we'll talk about that. That's only needed if you plan to, what we do, what we call back sweetening your wine, if you want to add some sugar back into it. Because I know a lot of us like a sweeter wine. Some of us like it as dry as it can be. But if you like a sweeter wine, and you decide to add some sugar back into it after it's finished fermenting, you'll need some potassium sorbate. Because the potassium sorbate will keep any residual yeast from starting to re-ferment the sugar that you've added back in. If you don't put that in, then what will happen is on a warm summer evening, you've got a bottle of wine stored in your basement, it might explode. And I've seen that happen in the past. So tannin. That's the material that adds a nice bite to the wine. It adds some sort of sharpness to it. And most recipes, most non-grape wine recipes are going to specify some amount of tannin to be used as you're preparing your must. So I would strongly suggest having some of that on hand. It's also a little bit of a purifier and it also acts as sort of a natural preservative. Don't add the tannin until you've consulted your recipe. Some recipes will call for it, some won't. And generally speaking, in the case of grape wine, there usually is enough tannin in the skins, although some of our northern hearty grapes don't have a way to hang onto that tannin. So even at some of our grapes, we have to add some tannin back in. This is the yeast nutrient or yeast energizer I was talking about. Again, if you do not use this, then your yeast becomes stressed. I had a batch of wine once that I didn't put any yeast nutrient or energizer in it when I was first starting out. And I swear I had this rotten egg smell coming out of the area where I was making the wine. I could not figure it out for the life of me. And it took a lot of extra work to eliminate that smell and salvage that batch of wine. And that's for an advanced wine making class that we'll maybe cover later on how to salvage a batch of wine where the yeast are stressed and the wine's starting to take on a rotten egg smell. It's a whole lot smarter and easier to add the yeast nutrient that's called for in the recipe at the front end as opposed to trying to rescue a batch of wine where the yeast never had the proper amount of energy or nutrients. So plan to do that for sure. There are just tons of yeast that are available to add into your must. And each one of the yeast that are available imparts a different type of characteristic or flavor. And these are just six of some of the more common ones that I've used. Over in the lower left-hand corner where it says LAVLIN EC1118, that's a no-frills yeast, but you can hardly mess up with it. It's an easy to work with yeast and it'll produce wines with the alcohol content all the way up to 16.5% or so. Some of the other ones here, the Montuchet, for example, they will kill themselves off when the wine alcohol content gets up to around 12.5 to 13%. So if you want basically a foolproof yeast to begin with, when you're first starting, I would go with the EC1118, the one on the lower left-hand corner, or the one in the middle of the top, the K1V1116. Both of those are almost a foolproof yeast. They won't cause you any problems. They won't give the wine any extra flavors. It'll just be the flavor of the fruit that you taste. But if you decide to be a little adventurous and go off on your second or third batch of wine with something different, these are just six that you can choose from, but there are literally dozens of them available as well. Make sure that you've stored your yeast properly. I always keep mine in the refrigerator. It's not necessary to freeze it, but I always keep it in the refrigerator until I'm ready to use it. If you've done everything carefully and done it properly and prepared the way it should be, you'll get what we call active fermentation. This is a brute garbage can. I can guarantee you it's never had garbage in it, but it is a food-grade container. So when I'm making a 20- or 25-gallon batch of wine, this is a 30-gallon container. So I've got space for things to bubble up a little bit without spilling over. So I've got about four or five of these, and they work really nicely as large fermenters for larger batches. This is easily worked with a 7 or 8-gallon pail or a 5-gallon pail depending on the size of the batch that you're making as long as it's a food-grade container. Now, when you're making a batch of wine, especially with grapes, but I'm just completing a batch of apple wine, I just finished with it last week and moved it into a different container. But when you're making the wine, and I'll just use grapes as my example, red grapes, for example, you ferment the grapes, the grape skins, the seeds, and the juice all together. So as the fermentation process is taking place, what's going on is that the fruit, the skins and the seeds and whatever leftover stems are, they're pushed to the top, and they form that sort of cap there. You can see that what it looks like is a large layer there, and everything below that is juice. The carbon dioxide as it's being, as the yeast are emitting the carbon dioxide, they're pushing that cap up. So at least twice a day, you could use a large potato masher, or you could use your stirring spoon. Any device, you need to push that cap down and mix it back up again. And this is just during that first 5 or 6 days of fermentation. If you don't do that, you'll have wild molds growing on the surface. But more importantly, you won't be able to capture all of the fruit and the desirable flavors from the pulp that's left there. So at least twice a day, push that down. And the other thing about that is you should always plan, if you're taking your punch-down tool, the tool that you use to push the cap down, if you're taking that out of the line, out of the must, each time you've pushed it down, you need to rinse it off, store it somewhere where it can be dry, and then spray it down the sanitizing solution before you go to punch it down the next time. During fermentation, we need to be measuring the specific gravity to know how fermentation is going. And we're shooting for a specific gravity. We want the wine, in a beginning winemaking session like this, you want to plan to have the wine ferment out to complete dryness, or as much of the sugar consumed as possible. But we don't want to keep it in that primary fermenter until it's fully fermented because you could run the risk of getting some oxygen contamination developing there. So about five or six days, you could even do this as early as three days. Take a sample of the juice and measure the specific gravity or what amount of sugar is left. If it's in that range of 1.010 to 1.020, then it's a good idea to think seriously about moving it into your secondary fermenter or what we call a glass carboy or that glass jug. Somehow or another, it needs to go into a fermenter where you can control the amount of oxygen that's trying to get in and spoil your wine. So when it's about 010 to 1.020, that's the time when you need to think seriously about racking it. Now, if you're fermenting the juice and the pulp, the skins, everything together, you can squeeze the wine by hand. You can use any kind of nylon metting type of material and squeeze it out. This is a lot of work, but I've made a lot of batches of wine this way as well. But it's important to separate the pulp before you move the new wine into that secondary fermenter. So that's one way to do it. And this is a way that I do it mostly now. When I make quite a few hundred pounds of grape wine, I'll use the press. It's a bladder press. It's the one on the left there. Inside of that device, there's a rubberized bladder. And you fill that up with water from your local garden hose. That expands and presses the juice against the sides. Those are sides are perforated there. That cylinder is perforated. And the wine flows out and you can put it into a container and move it into your glass carboy. The press on the right is sort of my modified version of a typical wine press or basket press. I made that entire press myself and I do have the plans, the free plans for those available for anybody that would like to make their own. And believe me, compared to hand pressing, using a basket press like this one on the right takes away a tremendous amount of work and you won't regret having taken the time to make that press yourself. And it'll run you about $60, $70 depending on how much of a craftsman you are. It doesn't take much to do it. It's quite simple. Just more patience than anything. And this is the device on the right, the basket press that I used to press my apple wine last Sunday. So let's say that you've just finished pressing and separating the fruit from the juice or the now wine that's still fermenting a little bit. You need to get it into a container that you can control the amount of oxygen. So this is the carboy and this could be a one gallon carboy or it could be a six gallon or a three gallon or anything in between. So most carboys are either one gallon, there are three gallons, there are five gallons, there are six and they're also six and a half gallon carboys. Now the airlock that I mentioned earlier, you need to put that on the top and fill it with a solution. You can just use water if you want but you have to use something in there that will allow the existing carbon dioxide that's being put out to come out but not allow any oxygen to get back into the wine. Now on the right-hand side there, I've got a little note that says head space is okay if the wine is still fermenting. You do not want to fill that up to the top of beyond about a two or three inches from the top when it's still fermenting or it will boil out, it will blast right up through the airlock and make a huge mess. So as long as there's still some fermentation going on, you want to keep some head space there. It's an entirely different story when you get to the point where you have the wine completed where the wine's completed fermentation, then you don't want any head space. I'll show you an example of that in just a minute. So the wine thief that I mentioned, that's just a big tube with a little trapdoor on the bottom and you insert that into whatever liquid that you're trying to take a sample from and allow it to fill up partially and then as you pull it back out that little trapdoor shuts down or it closes and there's your sample and that's where again you'll put the hydrometer in the lower right-hand side of this slide into the wine thief and you can take a reading that way and that'll tell you how much sugar is still left or how far along the fermentation has gotten and you'll know then at that point whether you need to consider moving it into another carboy where you top it off or maybe a smaller carboy where you top it off and there's no airspace left. So this is essentially what you're looking for when it comes to hydrometers and as I said here that you can use a simple little formula actually there are two of them that will help you determine what your specific gravity is and therefore your alcohol by volume. So starting out on that method number one where it says specific gravity 1 minus specific gravity 2 so that's just basically subtracting 1.095 from 0.995 and dividing that by 0.0074 is the figure of about 13.5%. So if you choose to use that method that will be fairly accurate. You can do the same thing with method two you're still doing the same subtraction but instead of dividing by 0.0074 you're actually multiplying the result by 132.715 and that will give you a figure of about 13.3%. These are not 100% accurate these formulas but they'll get you very very close to the ballpark of where you want to be as far as finding out what the alcohol by volume is of your wine. When your fermentation is all done and let me just draw your attention to the top of the picture where you see the wine container the carboy mostly topped off the wine is up towards the top. It's safe to leave it like that now because you want it up there you want that you want the wine all the way towards the top otherwise you will get oxygen contamination but in the bottom part of the picture there it shows all the sediment and we call that sediment the leaves and I'm not exactly sure where that term is derived from but that's just a term for sediment. Now when you're moving your wine from one container to another you have to be kind of careful but you're going to do this more than once you'll probably do this two or three times before you're ready to bottle your wine this is back when I used to work or make wine in my kitchen and what I would do is I would prop the carboy over to one side with a piece of wood or something hard enough to support the carboy and let it sit there for about 24 hours or at least a few hours to allow it to settle down and then carefully using my racking cane the site from the wine from the container that has the sediment the leaves into a clean container and you do have to be kind of careful so that you don't stir everything up because then you're kind of back to square one again now when you've determined that the wine is finished fermenting then you need to think seriously about how you're going to protect your wine yes I know folks will say well the alcohol will protect it not always you want to keep it from turning into vinegar or something that you wouldn't be happy to serve to somebody so this again is where we use potassium metal by sulfite to stabilize your wine and to keep it from oxidizing so the rule of thumb is to try to shoot for about 50 parts per million and that's not hard that would be again the equivalent of one or two Camden tablets depending on the strength of them per 5 or 6 gallon batch of wine or a quarter teaspoon of just the dried powder of potassium metal by sulfite and you stir that in and mix it in good and then that will protect your wine for at least a few months or until you get it bottled we'll talk a little bit more about that now I've had enough wine from individuals that have made it and it's got sediments in the bottle I don't know how you folks feel about it but I don't particularly like to drink wine that has sediments in the bottle so my belief is that you can only bottle perfectly clear wine if you bottle wine that's still fermenting that's going to have sediments in the bottle it could be exploding down the road give it some time when people start making wine right at the outset they want to get wine that they can drink right away wine is one of those wine making is one of those hobbies that you need to it helps you develop a lot of patience so you can use for clearing your wine just natural clearing anywhere from 6 to 12 months you can use clearing agents which may take several days to several weeks and then you can also filter your wine and that will enhance both of the two methods that I just made but again on the right hand side there when your wine is finished with fermentation it needs to be topped up to within a couple of inches of the top of the container and that's where you do not want to have headspace some of the things you can do to minimize headspace if you're making a 6 gallon batch of wine make an extra gallon and then as you siphon your wine from one container to another you'll always lose something but then you can use that extra gallon to top it off with some people will just move to a smaller container which is an old brainer that's really easily easy to do some people will sterilize marbles and I have never done that because I'm concerned about some of the types of materials that marbles are made out of and what that might do to your wine I don't know if they have lead in them or what so I wouldn't recommend doing that but they'll sterilize marbles to help displace that headspace so if you're going to store your wine for any more then a week or two in a carboy like this you do need to top up that headspace eliminate that and then make sure that you never allow the water to run out of fluid to evaporate out of fluid otherwise there's really no reason to have it on you need to have that barrier of liquid between the wine and the atmosphere these are some clarifiers that you can use and the bentonite that I mentioned earlier is just a clay powder you have to mix that into some hot water and stir that into your wine and that essentially attracts particles and helps them to precipitate out but there are other types of materials as well sparkaloid for example that's another type of powder some people will use gelatin there's a gelatin that's used just for winemaking for clarifying some people will use egg whites and yes just plain egg whites you have to separate out the yolk in this bottom center picture here it's one of the easiest clarifiers that you can find to use if you're going to be serving your wine to anyone that has an allergic reaction to shellfish because the ingredients in here is called super clear one is chitosan one is quesisol those are positively and negatively charged particles made from shellfish so they're shellfish derivatives but they work extremely well and the two come in a single packet there are two separate materials in there in a packet like that and you add one, stir it in wait for about three or four hours to add the other one in and inside probably I would guess four to six days you'll see your wine become really really quite clear it's still not ready to bottle but it becomes very clear so let's talk about bottles at some point you've got to get your wine out of the carboy and into some bottles and have a good bottle brush that bottle brush on the right hand side there you know what I've done is I've cut there's a little knob on the top of that and I cut that knob off and I put it in my electric drill and use that and that'll take out just about any kind of particles some of the wine bottles that people save and give to me but if you have friends that are going to save wine bottles for you or if you're going to use some of your own wine bottles the best gift you can give yourself when it comes to getting those bottles ready to use for your own wine is when you empty that wine bottle from whatever beverage you've got in there rinse it out three times and tip it upside down or let it dry then you don't have to scrub on it or anything everything's out of there if you let it stand upright or friends give you wine bottles that are used that are standing upright any number of things could be growing in them and it gets really difficult to get those types of containers clean if they haven't been rinsed out properly the wine bottles that you would be using would be only those that have had corks in them if you try to put corks into wine bottles that have had screw caps on there's a real risk that you'll break that screw cap bottle because the glass around where the screw cap goes isn't as thick and as strong as a typical wine bottle that had corks in it some people say well I'll just recycle my corks believe me you do not want to do that you use only good quality new corks and corks aren't expensive you can pick them up in bags like this for anywhere from 25 cents to a dollar depending on what kind of quality corks you want to use but corks that would protect your wine in the bottle for four or five years they're not going to cost you more than 25 to 35 cents so always use good quality new corks now let's talk about corkers you'll have to use a corker of some sort to seal up your wine bottle the corker on the left is the one that I said is an accident waiting to happen but it's also the corker that comes in most inexpensive wine making kits I found that the best way to use a hand corker and put a cork into a bottle of wine is to put the wine bottle on the floor squeeze it between my feet and then bend over and push those two handles down to put the cork in that's a lot of work and then it can sometimes slip off from under if you're out of way from your feet and cause an accident I would suggest instead of purchasing the hand corker which will cost about 35 to 40 dollars you can spend another 25 dollars and get a floor corker and then you don't have any of those issues developing the corks go in almost perfect every time and it's just a lot better easier way to put a cork into a wine bottle think seriously about either wanting your own floor corker maybe renting one from a wine making shop or going together with a friend or two and buying one but they aren't going to cost you more than about 65 to 75 dollars and just a little bit on labels these are some bottles of wine that I just labeled recently so you can make your own labels and be quite creative it's a lot of fun it also helps to tell you what you made it doesn't look like homemade wine if you put a decent label on there so you can have some fun with that you can get the shrink caps that go on the top and you can put those on with a hair blower or better yet a heat gun and they'll shrink right down and give your wine bottles a really nice professional look they're not necessary but they do provide for a nice finished appearance then I'm suggesting that you think seriously about at least checking out the North Dakota Grape and Wine Association go to their website our website we also have a Facebook page you can learn a ton more about growing grapes or other types of fruits as well as about making wine so we're a statewide association and we're always looking for an increase in new members to join and become a part of our organization so I'm just about ready to wrap it up here and I'd be happy to take some questions but I just wanted to close with this and say that you can make great wine all you need to do is first of all draw on yourself and some basic information do a little bit of reading pick up some books or you can learn a lot of good information on the internet ask lots of questions, ask me questions ask other winemakers questions you'll need that equipment that we talked about and none of that's too expensive and then have some patience it takes winemaking has been making wine for literally thousands of years for at least four thousand years there are or is historic evidence of people making wine and it's one of those pastimes or occupations it takes a lot of patience but you will be rewarded if you have some patience in the process and then lastly just get started don't be intimidated by it maybe your first batch of wine isn't so great but I guarantee you the second one will be even better and if you follow these basic winemaking principles that we've talked about here you will have a great batch of wine and something that you should be proud of something that you'll enjoy and something that you'd be happy to share with friends and family and so I'll just go ahead and leave it at I'll end up with that and Julia I'd be happy to answer questions either over my microphone if you have a question type it in the chat pod and Steve if you want to type in the information in the chat pod that'd be great so any questions for Steve okay there's a question here how great is the possibility of contamination using the wine thief that's a really good question and the wine thief is one of those tools that you should use the same sanitation procedures on that as you would anything else but an easy way to sanitize your wine thief is just dip it into your container with potassium metabasulfite if you've got a one gallon container of it just dip it in there swish it around a little bit and spritz the outside with your spray bottle potassium metabasulfite and you're good to go now that wine that you've taken out of there some people say you should never put that back into your fermenter you know what I always do because if I sanitize my tool properly then there's no reason not to go ahead and put it back in there the hydrometer is that device you're going to drop into your wine thief you still have to sanitize your hydrometer as well so that's basically it that's a really good question and it just makes sense anything that's going to touch the wine either as it's becoming wine through the fermentation or even after fermentation is finished needs to be sanitized and I just opened the wine making guide that we have on the NDSU Extension website and there are several recipes home wine, black currant wine cherry wine, rhubarb wine, strawberry now those are the ones that we have on that so that could certainly get you started Jim asks, can you use Welch's Grape Juice? Jim, there is a whole cult following behind Welch's Grape Juice wine making it's a whole new division of home wine making yes, you definitely can use Welch's Grape Juice or any kind of grape juice with one caveat and that is make sure that when you're reading the label on the container it doesn't contain any kind of preservative it can't contain a preservative or the yeast in the wine will not go to work now that said, Welch's you can make it dry, you can make it sweet you know, in North Dakota we grew up when I was growing up my parents would give me a little sip of Mogan David wine on New Year's Eve I thought that was wine it was until quite a few years later as a young adult I realized well there's a lot more than Mogan David wine out there so let me say this if you make wine out of Welch's Grape Juice it's going to taste a lot like Mogan David if you're trying to make something that has the flavor of Merlot or Cabernet or Pinot Noir you're not going to get that with Welch's Grape Juice but you will get a good drinkable wine it'll just have more of that conquered style flavor to it so go for it, try it I also see in some of your recipes that you are looking at where maybe a can of frozen grape juice is suggested as an additive to add a little bit of body and flavor and I've done that as well a little bit of grape juice and a rhubarb wine makes a delicious wine I do not have any resources on making mead per se but mead making is basically the same process except you're not adding as many products to it because the mead or the honey becomes the wine so there's a lot it's not really the process really is many different you're just using a different type of material from beginning to end how long is the wine making process and is there a strict timetable between stages or is there some flexibility if you're traveling or visiting great questions you can make about your wine probably two weeks maybe three weeks would it be ready to drink, would it taste good? minimum of six weeks so you could get it through fermentation and get it into a carboy probably even have the fermentation completed in about three weeks but it wouldn't be clarified and drinkable for about six weeks so my suggestion is to make two batches of wine and the first one is going to taste a little rough around the edges but you can drink that one right away while you're letting the second one complete it's nice life cycle and get about three months down the road before you bottle it I don't have I try not to bottle anything for at least six months most of my wine is a year old to a year and a half to two years old before I bottle it and I know that sounds like a long time but you know what have you got wine making is a great procrastinator's hobby because you don't have to do a lot of things at a certain time except at the very front you don't want your wine sitting in the primary fermenter and getting oxygenated initially that first five six seven eight days you're going to have a nice heavy layer of carbon dioxide down above the in the bottom of the top of the fermenter protecting your wine but as that starts to dissipate then your wine becomes even more vulnerable and that's why it's so important to get it into a container that you can seal up so that it doesn't get oxygenated wine and oxygen should always be kept as separate as possible until the point where you're going to enjoy it then you want oxygen in your wine but prior to that wine and oxygen are enemies yes we should have a workshop with samples to try this is probably the first or only second time I've ever taught a wine making class where we weren't sampling so if there's a way that we can put that together maybe off campus or some other location I'd be happy to do it okay one more question and then we have to call it a day any more questions do you use your basement there you go one from Kalsy or everything or someplace else you know I have two spots in my basement one is my mini winery where I make all the wine and one is my wine cellar where I store all the wine a few years ago my wife and I had a contractor dig out an old abandoned crawl space under a small portion of our house because it was smelly it was damp it wasn't good for anything and then we had them not they put a new foundation under it a basement foundation under it then we knocked a hole through our existing foundation and opened it up and turned it into a wine cellar it turned out beautifully but more importantly we made a point of not putting in a heat duct or anything like that into the wine cellar and it keeps we wanted to keep it cool so it keeps the wine at a nice temperature right around 56 or 58 degrees almost year round so I stored my wine in my basement and it's almost always nice and chilly there it keeps it cool and it's a good place to store it place where you don't want to store your wine you've got a fancy wine rack on your kitchen table on your kitchen covers because it gets too long there and on the topic of storing wine unless it's a screw cap or a synthetic cork always store your wine bottles on their side you need to keep that cork wet so that it doesn't dry out and you get oxygen seeping into the wine okay I'm going to draw our session to a close and see if it's provided his contact you will be getting a a short survey to fill out and I encourage you to do that and you also have the option on that survey to give us ideas for further webinars maybe the summer or next fall or spring but thank you all for attending and thank you Steve for stepping out of your workshop and have a great rest of your day my pleasure happy winemaking everyone