Homemade Equipment

[KevinInKY]

Let's see everyone's homemade wine making/storing/bottling equipment. Making stuff gives us something to do while we wait for our wine to finish. I have saw some amazing things people have made and am looking for more ideas!

 

[NorCal]

I made a wine box to store my wine during our hot CA summers. Also check out this recent thread.

 

[balatonwine]

Something to do?

With the non-stop work beginning with vineyard trimming in February, to the last harvest in September, I am happy to just lie and stare at the ceiling from October till next February.

 

[M38A1]

I recently made a bucket press.... Three nested primaries and a catch bucket. The overall concept is good I believe but the grapes here (wild Muscadine) are slimy-slimy-slimy and don't yield a lot of juice. Looking at images on the site here, I'm under the impression with 'quality' grapes there is a ton of free run juice with simple hand mashing where I believe this would work quite well. Maybe $75 for the food grade buckets, lids and spigot.

Heres the nested buckets in pressing configuration

Here's the four buckets. The top left is the pressing bucket with a lid to sit on. The middle bucket is the grape/must perforated bucket. The top right bucket is the catch and drain bucket. The bottom bucket is for collection.

Here's the perforated bucket. Took me about an hour with my cordless to punch all those holes. The bung's in the bottom were to allow juice to run underneath the pressing bucket. In reality the nesting of the buckets stops it before the bung stoppers. My friend said how cool it looked with all those machine poked holes. Yeah, it was my drill and I winged it on spacing, size (3/16") and just followed the various lines on the bucket to make it look good.

Here's 117lbs gross harvest of the slimy little guys....

 

[FTC Wines]

I made this oak wine press 3 years ago. It was a metal kit, i.e. All metal parts, just add All the wood. I chose oak. Pic shows pressing. Black tarp is covering 700 bottles on our wine rack. Pressing in a 68* room, not 90* outside! Roy