The difference between an average home wine and an award-winning one often lies in the selection of the yeast, an unknown or often ignored practice in home winemaking.
Sure. Making a good wine implies growing or buying good fruits and good winemaking. But making wine, and certainly making great wine, goes beyond buying grapes or juice and then adding yeast, any yeast, and waiting for fermentation to complete before bottling. And the days of relying on indigenous yeast for work are over; the results can be unpredictable and unreliable, or even cause deterioration.
If you want to make award-winning wines that can outperform even commercial wines, then you need to select a wine yeast, and choose wisely. With the plethora of specialized yeast strains now available, you can select a strain specifically for your grape variety or juice and desired style of wine. But it shouldn’t end there. There is no one magic yeast strain, although there are other favourites. So try experimenting with different yeast strains by fermenting several batches and then comparing wine from different batches. You may find that one variety produces better aromas and flavors, perhaps those that are more typical of the variety. Then try mixing batches of different strains and in different combinations – the results will surprise you. And avoid the practice of combining two or more strains to ferment the same batch; this can cause strains to compete and perhaps produce unpredictable results in terms of aromas, flavors, and mouthfeel.
Yeast manufacturers’ websites and home winemaking literature now provide useful information and performance specifications to help you choose the right yeast for your needs. Familiarize yourself with some of the terminology that describes yeast characteristics, such as optimal fermentation temperature, hydrogen sulfide production, nutrient requirements, as they provide key usage information and clues to expected results.
And remember the first rule of home winemaking: be patient. Making wine takes time. Don’t expect to ferment, bottle, and drink it all in a couple of months, unless you’re making wine from a kit, and even then, I’d recommend going slow. Wine needs time to reach its peak; aromas and flavors do not develop overnight. The wine is not a final result, but an evolution of aromas, flavors, mouthfeel.
Once the wine has finished fermenting and has stabilized, taste each batch at least once a month; you will notice that your wine will improve a lot after six months, perhaps more depending on the style of wine you are making. Reds generally benefit from longer aging, eg twelve months.
Once you’ve selected which batches are best and how to blend, it’s ready for bottling, and again, I recommend some bottle aging to allow the wine to settle and improve. Your patience will be greatly rewarded.