Welcome to my basement. I'm Paul, I'm 47, and I make about thirty gallons of wine a year in the corner of the cellar that used to hold the Christmas decorations. I've been at it since 1993, when a friend gave me a kit for my birthday as a joke and it turned out to be the best joke anybody ever played on me. I am not a professional and I don't pretend to be; I'm an accountant who likes a good glass of red and likes even more to be able to say "I made that." This page is what I've learned in six years of weekends.

You need less than you think, and the homebrew shop in town sells all of it. This is my list for a 5- or 6-gallon batch, which is the size most kits make and a good size to start with (it's about 25 bottles).

• A primary fermenter. A food-grade plastic bucket, 7 or 8 gallons, with a lid. Bigger than the batch, because fermentation foams.
• A 6-gallon glass carboy. The big water-bottle-looking jug. This is where the wine goes after the first week or two, and where it sits for months. Glass, not plastic, for anything that ages. Get a carrying handle or a milk crate; a full carboy weighs about 60 pounds and is slippery.
• A bung and an airlock. The rubber stopper with a hole, and the little plastic S-shaped gadget that goes in it. Half-fill the airlock with water; it lets the gas out and keeps the air and the fruit flies out. Buy two; they crack.
• A hydrometer and a tall test jar. The glass float that tells you the sugar in the juice (specific gravity), which tells you how the fermentation is going and, before and after, roughly how much alcohol you'll end up with. Three dollars, and the single most useful thing on this list. Learn to read it.
• A racking cane and siphon hose. A rigid tube with a tip on it and five or six feet of food-grade hose, for moving wine from one container to the next without stirring up the sediment. Never suck on the hose to start it. (I'll admit I did, in 1993.) Fill the hose with water and let gravity do it, or buy the little pump.
• Sanitizer. Potassium metabisulfite (comes as powder or as Campden tablets) for a sulfite rinse, or one of the no-rinse sanitizers from the shop. Not bleach in anything that touches wine, unless you rinse like your life depends on it.
• Bottles, corks and a corker. 25 bottles per 5 gallons. Save your own (wash out and pull the labels the same night), or the shop sells cases of new ones. A floor corker is worth the money if you're going to keep at this; the little hand ones will make you swear.
• Odds and ends: a long-handled spoon, a big funnel, a strainer bag, a thermometer, a notebook. The notebook. Write down everything: dates, gravity readings, what you added, what it smelled like. You'll thank yourself in two years.
• If you're doing grapes and not a kit: a crusher (or clean hands and a lot of patience), a press (I rent one for a day from the homebrew shop; several of us go in together), and more buckets than you'd believe.

All told, about $100 to $150 to get started with a kit, not counting the kit. After that it's just kits or grapes, corks, and sanitizer, year after year.

Every kit comes with its own instructions and you should follow them, especially the first time; every batch of grapes is a little different and there are whole books on it. But the shape of the thing is always the same, and once you see the shape, the rest is details.

1. Sanitize everything. Everything. Every bucket, every spoon, every hose, every bottle, every time. Wine is grape juice that a yeast turned into something wonderful, and it can just as easily be grape juice that a stray bacterium turned into vinegar. Ninety percent of bad homemade wine is bad because something wasn't clean. Clean first, then sanitize. Then don't touch it with your hands.
2. Get the juice ready. For a kit: pour the juice concentrate into the primary, add water to the line, stir. For grapes: crush, stem, and into the primary, skins and all for red. Take a hydrometer reading and write it down. Most reds start around 1.085 to 1.095. Add sulfite per the directions and wait a day before the yeast.
3. Primary fermentation. Add the wine yeast. Within a day or two it's bubbling and foaming and the whole basement smells like a bakery. With grapes, the skins float up into a "cap" that you push down with the spoon two or three times a day. This is the loud, fast part, and it lasts about a week. Keep it around 70 to 75 degrees for a red. Take a reading every day or two. When the gravity is down to about 1.010 or so, it's time to move on.
4. Rack to the carboy. Siphon the wine off the sediment (the "lees") into the clean carboy, leaving the gunk behind. For grapes, press the skins first and add the press wine back. Fit the bung and airlock. Fermentation finishes slowly in here, a few more weeks, until the hydrometer says it's dry (0.995 or below, and steady).
5. Rack again, and again. Every couple of months, siphon the wine off whatever has settled into another clean carboy. Each time it gets clearer. Add a little sulfite when you rack, per the directions, to protect it. Top up the carboy so there's almost no air on top. Air is the enemy from here on.
6. Aging. This is the part where you do nothing, which is the hardest part. A kit white might be ready in a few months. A kit red, six months to a year. A red from grapes, a year in the carboy, minimum, and then more in the bottle. It sits in the dark, at cellar temperature, and gets better while you wait. If you rush this you will drink a lot of harsh wine and wonder what everyone sees in the hobby.
7. Bottling. One last racking, this time into bottles. Sanitize the bottles, fill to about an inch below where the cork will sit, cork, and stand them up for a day or two before laying them down. Label them (date, grape, batch) or you will be holding a mystery bottle two years from now. Then leave them alone for a few more months at least; wine goes through a sulk after bottling and comes out of it.

That's it. Sanitize, ferment, rack, age, bottle. Everything else is technique, and technique is what the notebook is for.

I do both, and I'd tell anyone starting out to do a kit first.

Kits. A box with a bag of grape juice concentrate (or, in the better kits, pure juice), the yeast, the additives, and a sheet of instructions. Add water, follow the sheet, and in a few weeks to a few months you have 25 bottles of perfectly decent wine. A cheap kit is $40 to $50 and makes something you'd be happy to drink on a Tuesday. A good one is $80 to $120 and makes something you'd serve to company without apologizing. You can make a kit any month of the year, the results are predictable, and the instructions are written for a beginner. I still do two or three kits a year, usually whites, since I don't have a source for white grapes and I like a white on the porch in July.

Fresh grapes. Now we're talking. Real grapes, crushed by you, with the skins and the seeds and the smell of the vineyard on them. It's harder, messier, more unpredictable, and only possible for a few weeks in the fall, and the wine is better. Not always. Sometimes it's worse, and it's your fault, and you know exactly why because it's in the notebook. But when it's better, it's better, and it's yours in a way a kit never quite is.

Since 1996 I've bought Zinfandel grapes every September from a farmer a couple of hours' drive from here who has a few acres of old vines and sells some of the crop to home winemakers by the lug. I get about 300 pounds, which gives me roughly 20 gallons of finished wine after pressing and racking and everything. He tells me the sugar and acid numbers when I pick them up, we talk about the weather that year, and I drive home with the back of the wagon full of grapes and the windows down because the bees find you at every stoplight.

Zinfandel is a good grape for a home winemaker: it ripens with a lot of sugar, it's forgiving, and it makes a big, fruity, peppery red that tastes like something even when you're a little clumsy with it. It's what a lot of home winemakers in California made through the whole of the last century, and there's a reason.

Copied from the notebook, cleaned up a little.

• Sept. 26, 1998. Picked up 12 lugs of Zinfandel (about 300 lbs). A cool year, a late harvest; the farmer said he'd been nervous about rain. Grapes clean, small berries, a few raisined clusters I sorted out. Crushed and destemmed that evening with two friends and a rented crusher in the driveway. Into three primaries. Starting gravity 1.092. Added sulfite. Yeast the next morning.
• Sept. 28 - Oct. 4. Fermenting hard by the 28th. Punched the cap down three times a day. Basement at 72. Smell of it came up through the floor and my wife mentioned it, not entirely in a good way. Gravity 1.020 on Oct. 3.
• Oct. 5. Pressed. Rented the press, same two friends, same driveway, a lot of purple. Free-run and press wine together into four carboys and a gallon jug for topping up. About 22 gallons.
• Oct. - Nov. Finished dry (0.994) by the end of October. First racking Nov. 14. Very cloudy, very purple, tasted like grape candy and pepper. Promising.
• Jan. 1999. Second racking. Clearer. Sulfite. Topped up.
• April 1999. Third racking. Starting to taste like wine and not juice. Tannin still rough. Patience.
• Aug. 1999. Bottled. 108 bottles of 1998 Zinfandel, plus the gallon jug's worth in a couple of odd bottles for "testing." It's young, and it's a little lean from the cool year, but it's got good fruit and the pepper is there. I think it'll be very good by next fall. I opened one on Labor Day and it was good enough that my brother-in-law asked for a case, which he is not getting.

For what it's worth, my 1997 was bigger and riper (a hot year) and the 1996, my first from grapes, was, let's say, a learning experience. See Mistakes.

Crush day was Saturday, September 18, 1999, a week earlier than last year because it was a warmer summer and the grapes were ready. Same farmer, same Zinfandel, 13 lugs this time because I got greedy. Beautiful fruit. Sugar was higher than '98; my starting gravity came in at 1.098, which means a bigger wine and I'll need to watch the fermentation temperature so it doesn't run away from me.

Crushed and destemmed in the driveway Saturday afternoon with the usual crew, plus a neighbor who wandered over to see what the noise was and left with purple hands and a promise of a bottle. Sulfited Saturday, pitched the yeast Sunday morning. As of today (the 25th) it's a week in, fermenting like mad, cap coming up thick and I'm punching it down morning, noon and night. Gravity was 1.030 last night. I'll press this coming weekend if it's down around 1.010, and then it's into the carboys and the long wait.

Notes so far: the basement is running a little warm (76) so I've got a fan on the primaries. Smells fantastic. My wife has stopped mentioning it. Progress.

I'll keep this section updated through pressing and the first racking, and then it goes quiet until spring, because that's the hobby.

1. Not sanitizing. My 1994 kit went to vinegar because I "rinsed" the carboy. Five gallons down the drain. I have never skipped it since. See step one. It's step one for a reason.
2. Bottling too early. Kit red, 1995. Bottled it at three months because I wanted to give it away for Christmas. It was harsh and fizzy and I gave away 25 bottles of embarrassment. Wait. Let the hydrometer, not the calendar, tell you it's done, and then wait some more.
3. Leaving air in the carboy. My first grape batch, 1996: I racked into a carboy and left it a third empty for two months. The top of the wine went brown and sherry-like. Top up. Always. Keep a gallon jug of the same batch for exactly this, or use a smaller carboy.
4. Sucking on the siphon hose. Your mouth is not sanitized. Fill the hose with water or use a pump.
5. Letting a red ferment too hot. 1997, a hot September, the basement hit 82, the fermentation took off, and the wine came out with a cooked-jam taste. Cool it down. A fan, wet towels on the primaries, whatever works.
6. Not writing it down. I have a carboy from 1996 that I think was a Cabernet kit. I think. Keep the notebook.
7. Panicking. Wine goes through ugly stages: cloudy, stinky, purple sludge on the bottom. Almost all of it is normal. Rack it, sulfite it, wait, and taste it again in two months before you pour anything out. Most wine that gets thrown away by beginners would have been fine.
8. Making too much of one thing. Thirty gallons is 150 bottles. That's a lot of one wine. Do a few different things. Your friends will get tired of your Zinfandel, even if you don't.

Still to write: reading a hydrometer (with a drawing, once I figure out how to scan one), a page on whites, and my thoughts on oak chips, which are mixed. Also the farmer has offered me a couple of lugs of Petite Sirah next year and I might just.

Neighbors on GeoCities.us: Rosa's Kitchen Table for what to eat with it (her tamales and a young Zinfandel are a very good idea), Hilltop Herb Farm, and Sourdough Sam, another fellow who lets yeast do his work for him.