How do you make homemade wine? We want to know how to make homemade wine, certainly. “How do I make homemade wine?” you may be asking yourself. Where are the homemade wine recipes?

Well, you’ll be perhaps surprised to learn that homemade wines are exploding in popularity across the world! Why? There are several reasons for this.

The biggest reason is probably that the cost to transport that yummy nectar from where they grow, harvest, and ferment it is going up, up, up right along with the cost of fuel. There’s no two ways around it. With the geopolitical events we see on the news every night, almost always involving one oil-producing middle eastern country or another, we are definitely going to see bottles of wine at the grocery store and wine shops double in price, at the very least. When the cost of transportation (gas prices based on the price of oil)  goes up, that increased cost is ALWAYS passed on to the consumer. That’s one of the ways inflation increases, and that means less money in your wallet for the other things you need in life.

Because of this, in the last year, there’s been a bunch of  “How To” guides cropping up all around the Internet. All of the guides are helpful and at least can get a beginner started, but I’m still looking for the definitive guide, and the one that reveals the hidden secrets that will allow us to have the most leverage we can possibly have, in difficult economic times, or good ones. That way, no matter what happens in the world, we don’t have to worry about enjoying excellent-quality wines whenever we want some!

The truth is, you can make excellent wine, award-winning wine, at home, in a 5-gallon food bucket. However, some preparation and materials are absolutely required. You can’t just use your salad shooter to make wines! You have to have, at the very least,  a hydrometer, the 5-gallon bucket, and some type of almost air-tight secondary fermentation vessel. In the industry, I found out, this is called a “carboy.” There are very inexpensive airlocks and some plastic tubing to round out the equipment. None of these things are expensive, and they are one-time expenditures. They’re not things you have to spend money on over and over as you progress as a homemade wine-maker.

One of the things that seems like a pretty big secret in home wine-making is this: get the good stuff to start with, and you’ll be much better off than if you try to make it a no-cost operation from the start. If you lay out a little cash in the beginning to get things started, that cash lay-out should pay off big-time as time moves forward. Think of it like a business. These are your “start-up costs” that every business has when they get going.

In general, homemade wine-making has so many benefits to it. Besides the long-term money savings (you can make wine for about 25 cents a bottle, I’ve found!), which is a pretty sweet benefit all by itself, there are also the other benefits of homemade wine-making, like the actual enjoyment of making something great that you can drink yourself! AND if your batch turns out really yummy, you know you will be calling all of your friends and neighbors to come over and give it a try!

Party on!

As you can see, all of these reasons are why people all over the globe are turning to making their own homemade wines, rather than going to the store and buying wines all the time, which is a cost they have zero control of. If you make your own wines, you have much more control over the product than if you “leave it to someone else.” I like being in control of my expenses, personally.

Don’t you?