Wine making tips

Long before you harvest your first crop of grapes you will have had to plan what to do with it. Many smaller vineyards simply sell their crop to a local winery that then produces a wine. Or you can make a wine yourself. Making your own wine requires a lot of investing in equipment, such as wine-tanks and oak barrels (if you want to make a higher quality wine) as well as de-steamers and presses. If you are going to make a higher quality wine you will need to store the wine for 1-3 years to mature, preferably in oak barrels. If you make 50,000 liters of wine and want to store it for 2 years you will actually need a minimum of 100 000 litters of oak barrel storage and wine barrels cost a lot! It is of course a lot cheaper to make the wine in steel tanks and then also store it in the very same tanks, and as soon as possible after that bottle the wine. Bottling equipment and corkers are other things that are on your “to buy” list if this is the way you want to go. Things like bottling equipment is available fully hand powered, no electricity needed and this is probably what would suite me, as I also plan to run my vineyard ecologic!

http://www.your-own-wine.com/

Simple facts and info.

1. It normally takes 1 kg of grapes to produce one 70ml bottle of wine. This means that on one ton (1000 kg) of grapes you get 700 liters of wine.

2. Price of grapes if you plan to sell them to a winery is about $0.30 – $0.60 per kilo. This is for the simplest type of grapes, not classified and non organic.

3. On one acre of land you can estimate a grape production of 2 to 3 tons, but this could be much less or more, but as a basic rule it works.

4. On one acre of land you can calculate a yearly production of about 1500 to 2000 bottles of wine.