Wine Making Equipment: The Essential List

Having the proper wine making equipment is essential to successfully making good wine. The things that you will need are a primary fermenter, carboy, plastic buckets, airlocks, corks, corker, carboy and bottle brushes, hydrometer, siphoning tubes, wine bottles, and an oak barrel is optional, thought highly recommended.

You need a primary fermenter to allow for carbon dioxide to escape during fermentation. This can be a large plastic bucket with a lid and you will need to punch a hole in the lid and insert an air-lock. For larger batches of wine, an oak barrel or plastic garbage bin can be used.

A glass carboy is used for secondary fermentation. It has to be glass because plastic absorbs air which may cause the wine to oxidize.

You can never have enough plastic buckets in your arsenal of wine making equipment. They are needed for carrying, racking, and mixing ingredients. Using a variety of different sizes of buckets can prove to be useful during the wine making process.

Airlocks are fermentation traps that allow carbon dioxide to escape from the wine during fermentation. They also keep the oxygen and air-born bacteria from getting to the wine.

Other equipment that you will need is wine bottles and corks for the bottles. You can use naturally cut corks or agglomerated corks. You will also need a corker to insert the corks into the bottles. It is crucial for the seal to be tight when preserving the wine.

You will also need carboy and bottle brushes to clean out the glass carboys. These brushes allow for easy cleaning.

A hydrometer is another tool for wine making you will need because it is needed to measure the sugar content of the wine. How the rod floats will tell you the sugar content in the wine. There are markings along the rod so you can measure the content.

During the racking and bottling process, you will need siphoning tubes to get the wine from one container to the other. They should be long enough to reach the bottom of the container that you are siphoning the wine from.

If you are thinking of making wine from home, then it is important to have the essential wine making equipment.