Wine Making Equipment for Making Wine At Home

Many people are making wine at home now, not leaving it to the prestigious wineries located all over the world. The wine making hobby can be enjoyed by people who live everywhere, not just the more popular wine making areas like France, Italy or even California. Sometimes the hobby can get out of hand and become a small home based business.

Although wine making equipment can be costly, local supply stores and even the internet make finding the equipment easy. Check that the quality of the wine making equipment is high enough to make wine that you can drink safely. Dangerous chemicals and bacteria have several chances to enter your wine.

The most basic piece of equipment you will need is a glass jug, known as a Carboy, that is available in many different sizes. Bungs, or rubber stoppers, are the next most important piece of wine making equipment. The rubber stoppers will have the airlocks installed in them after they have holes drilled in them. The Carboy and the bung must fit together.

Oxygen can adversely affect the taste of the wine. The airlock prevents oxygen from entering the wine. Any oxygen that enters the wine can start oxidizing and ruin the taste of the wine you are making.

During the fermentation process the sugar amount of the wine to test it's sweetness. A Hydrometer tube is the piece of wine making equipment that performs this test. It resembles a large thermometer with a strip of paper with numbers on it inside the tube of glass.

The most recognized piece of wine making equipment is the "Wine Thief". The Wine Thief is the plastic or glass sampling tubes that you see winemakers use when testing the wine. You hold your finger over the end, like a child with a soda and a straw, to make a vacuum seal to draw the sample of wine for tasting

Plastic buckets is common equipment when making wine at home. Not many people can afford the large oak barrels that are used by the large wineries. When deciding what size bucket to get make sure it is large enough to hold all the foam that the fermentation process creates.

One of the final pieces of wine making equipment is the hose used to "rack" the wine. Racking the wine is just the official name for siphoning the wine from one container to another. A siphoning hose is used for this step.

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