[Twotone]

Well, a very quick run-down of the process is:

1) You crush your fruit & place it in a primary fermenter with appropriate chemicals & yeast.

2) You stir twice a day to provide the yeast with oxygen.

3) After 4-6 days you remove the fruit & rack into a carboy with an airlock, being careful to leave the lees behind.

4) After 3 weeks you rack again into another carboy, leaving the lees behind.

5) After 3 months you rack again to remove the lees.

6) After 6 months you rack again to remove the lees, & continue every 6 months until the wine is clear.

7) When clear & stable you bottle & cork.

8) Age for a period - 6 months maybe - and then try it. If you like it you start enjoying.

We add sulphites every other rack to prevent oxidization, & we like our wine sweet, so we add sugar which feeds the yeast & keeps it working. The batch that took the least amount of time was a Port we made which finished in 6 months. That was a record. Generally, the process takes about two years from start to completion.

It’s a fun hobby, but there is a financial & time component. We started taking our wines to the state fair to get the comments of judges & gradually improved the result. Now we are very satisfied with what we make. But we wouldn’t have bothered to begin with if we hadn’t already been imbibers.

[GeronL]

I think it would be interesting to try, not that I am in that position right now. There is a plum tree in the front yard though... hhmmmm... heh.

Or that other process, throw fruit and kool-aid into a trash bag and let it sit in a corner of the cell for a while. lol. just kidding.

[Victor]

"...we like our wine sweet, so we add sugar which feeds the yeast & keeps it working. The batch that took the least amount of time was a Port we made which finished in 6 months. That was a record. Generally, the process takes about two years from start to completion....."

It's your penchant for the sweetness, no doubt, that adds so much time to your process.

I ferment my wines to complete dryness...my whites are ready to bottle in less than 6 months. I prefer to leave my reds in the barrel for at least a year; 18 months is better...and then bottle.

But since you like sweet wines: There is another way to get a sweeter wine: rack it (or press if it's a red) at around 3 Brix. Sulphite it to at least 50ppm free SO2, and fine-filter it with a #3 filter pad, to remove the yeast. Also chill it...what you don't want is for the fermentation to start up again; which is taken care of by the SO2 and the filtering. The chilling will also help arrest the fermentation, but it's not as crucial as the SO2 and filtering.