The wine making process has been around for thousands of years. If the ancient Egyptians and Romans could do it, you should be able to do it with information from the Internet or by calling up your friend who has already made his own wine. So what are the basic steps for wine making? Well, it can be broken down into 5 basic steps.

1. Harvesting the grapes. The first step is to get the main ingredients for wine, the grapes. Deciding when to harvest is really important, because by doing it too early, you risk not having enough sugar to convert into alcohol, and your wine won’t be that great. If you wait too late into the season, three things can happen: the grapes can freeze on the vine; it can rain, which will also lower the sugar content in the grapes; or you can get the perfect grape.

2. Crushing the grapes. You may have images of Italian maidens crushing the grapes in a big tub while barefoot, but very few of the larger vineyards still crush their grapes by hand (or foot). Most of them use mechanical presses to save a lot of time. The skins and stems are removed at some point before bottling (and depending on how long they are left in the wine will determine the color of the wine.

3. Fermentation. After you have your juice, it needs to be fermented with yeast to actually make the wine. Usually, sulfur dioxide is also added to the wine to make sure that bacteria and mold won’t cause a problem.

4. Racking and aging. When the wine has stopped fermenting, it’s always a good idea to let the wine sit in order to let all of the sediment settle to the bottom. If you want to age your wine for any length of time, you can do it in oak barrels for months or for years.

5. Bottling. Bottling your wine is the fun step, because you do some taste tests (for scientific purposes, of course). This is the final step which makes you a bit sentimental, especially if this is your first batch.

There you have it, the five steps in the wine making process. It isn’t complicated, and you don’t really need a lot of supplies, so you should definitely give it a try!