Hi, I'm Sebastian Desotelle with Midwest Supplies and Northern Brewer,
where twice a year we're able to offer home winemakers unique opportunity
to bring some of the freshest and highest quality grape juice, or must, home to ferment into your
own wine. This comes from different vineyards and regions around the world, and I'm going to
tell you a little bit more about what you can expect and some tips and tricks along the way.
Harvest is always an exciting time of year, and luckily with the Northern and Southern
Hemisphere we're able to take advantage of that excitement twice. During the spring,
we work with vineyards in Chile in the Southern Hemisphere where they harvest crush and press more
than a dozen varietal grapes into fresh juice that is frozen and shipped north for us to ferment.
Then in the fall, we're able to repeat the entire process in the Northern Hemisphere
and indulge in some of the best that Italy and California have to offer.
Now, I use the term "frozen" pretty loosely.
The buckets are packaged and shipped to us at 26 degrees Fahrenheit, but with the BRIX,
or sugar content, of that juice it doesn't actually freeze into a solid mass. Usually it's
a little bit more slushy. But, the biggest thing is it's cold enough for the yeast to not ferment.
So, what makes this fresh juice such high quality? Well, let's look at something you might be a
little bit more familiar with with -- wine kits. Now, some of you have made one or two kits, where
there are some who have filled their entire cellar. When you're looking at wine kits the
biggest difference in price and quality is the amount of varietal juice you have
compared to the concentrate and typically how much water you're then topping up with. So, whether you
have a kit that's 10-, 12-, 16-, 18-liters they all make six gallons, or 23 liters, of wine.
With the fresh juice coming in from the vineyards and regions around the world it is 100 %
unconcentrated varietal juice that makes some of the best wine that I've personally made at home.
Now, let's talk about the fresh varietal juice and how easy the process is. Once the grapes
are harvested, crushed and pressed, the juice is balanced for acidity and then put into a
six-gallon fermenter with a built-in airlock. The vineyard then selects specific yeast strains for
each varietal of grapes and then chills it down to put the yeast into hibernation. That frozen juice
is then shipped up to the Midwest or Northern Brewer retail stores, where literally all you
have to do is pick up the juice, let it thaw, and the yeast will wake up and start fermenting the
fresh juice into wine. And really, that's it. From there, that's your primary fermentation, you would
then transfer to your secondary, stabilize, degas, clarify just like any wine kit that you've made.
Now, I've made a pile of these wines to now make up a huge portion of my cellar,
and there are a few things that you can do on the first day to help you along the way and help
the process. For example, one of the things that we recommend is adding some bentonite
and nutrient. Betonite, all you have to do is open up the bucket when you get it home, mix up
the bentonite per the instructions on the packet, and sprinkle that in. This typically does come
in all the wine kits, so you're probably already familiar with this process. You're just adding it
after you're at six gallons versus in the wine kit you add it right away to a little bit of water.
For nutrient, it is definitely recommended to add nutrient to these. I've done it without
nutrient and it ferments just fine. The nutrient just helps your yeast out
a little bit more. These have gone into hibernation and they've traveled a long
way at pretty cold temperatures. So, having some nutrient in there gets these just a
little bit more of what they need to ferment the wine a little bit better.
As mentioned before, the fresh juice ships up in a six gallon bucket with a built-in airlock.
Now a pro tip on this is it's six gallons of fresh juice in a six and a half gallon bucket,
and you can just fermented in that just fine. What I like to do is actually transfer it over
into a 7.9 gallon bucket. It just gives a little bit more head space. And, it does prevent maybe a
little bit of that wine spreading out the top and having to wipe off some spray off of your wall,
your wife yelling at you, getting mad at you, you're not allowed to make wine anymore.
If you're transferring your wine over to a different bucket, again while this isn't
necessary, if you do transfer it over make sure to stir up all of the yeast that may
have settled down to the bottom of the bucket. What I typically do is pour in
about half of the wine that's in the bucket into my sanitized fermenter. Then I take a
sanitized spoon and stir it really aggressively to get any of that yeast that have settled out,
and then pour the remainder of the juice into the bucket as well. That just makes sure that you
don't leave any healthy yeast behind and you're going to have the best fermentation possible.
Not only does the additional headspace give you a little bit more room for the fermentation to
happen it also gives you a little bit more space if you want to customize your wine a
little bit more. In a red wine you could add in grape skins to add a little bit more body,
a little bit more tannin, and a little bit more boldness and character.
In the really high-end wine kits, a lot of the red wines will come with grape skins. We offer
grape skins a la carte on the side so you can take this 100% varietal juice and add in your
grape skins just to bring up that quality even more. If you're going to add in the grape skins
I will tell you from personal experience they will not fit in the bucket that it comes in.
It displaces too much volume and so you do need to transfer that over into a 7.9 gallon bucket.
Now, whether you transfer into a 7.9 gallon larger fermenting bucket or
you ferment right in the bucket that it came in -- totally fine.
The next steps are exactly the same you're going to transfer into a carboy,
you're going to stabilize, degas just like you've done in your wine kits before. If you haven't done
a wine kit before, no stress, we have step-by-step instructions that come with these buckets that'll
walk you through every bit of the process that you need to make this wine from beginning to end.
So now that you know all about the juice, let me tell you a little bit about how to get it.
We start the preorders for these a couple months leading into harvest. So, in the spring we usually
start preorders around February and those go into about the end of March. In the fall for
the Northern Hemisphere we start preorders around July to August time frame and those go through
September with the juices arriving in October, roughly speaking. Again, we are at the mercy of
harvest and the grapes growing themselves. We try to make this as easy as possible for you.
You can preorder either in our retail stores or online. If you do preorder online, they still must
be picked up at one of the local retail stores, either Midwest Supplies or Northern Brewer.
To make sure that you don't miss out on this opportunity be sure to follow our social media,
follow MidwestSupplies.com and NorthernBrewer.com and keep updated on some of the emails that we
send out, because we do try to make sure that you don't miss the opportunity of harvest this year.