🍷 Homemade Port-Style Wine: Making Natural Wine with No Added Sugar
Making homemade wine is a natural continuation of working with grapes after the harvest. When grapes are grown by hand, without excessive chemicals and with proper care, they become excellent raw material for natural homemade drinks.
In this video, I show the process of making homemade port-style wine — an aromatic, rich wine made without any added sugar, exclusively from homegrown grapes. The video is short, but it clearly conveys both the process and the atmosphere of this stage of winemaking.
🍇 Raw Material: Grapes as the Foundation of Quality Wine
The quality of homemade wine begins in the vineyard. For a port-style wine, well-ripened berries with high sugar content, dense pulp, and expressive aroma are ideal. That is why it is so important to:
choose the right grape variety;
wait for full ripeness;
harvest in dry weather;
minimize damage to the berries during harvest.
Homegrown grapes allow full control over the quality of the raw material even before winemaking begins.
🍷 The Process of Making Homemade Port-Style Wine
The video shows one of the classic home approaches to making port-style wine:
separating grapes from the stems;
crushing the grapes and obtaining the must;
natural fermentation without added sugar;
separating the juice from the pomace (solid grape residues consisting of skins, pulp, and seeds);
stopping active fermentation with alcohol (approximately at a sugar level of 16%);
settling the wine;
double racking of the wine — removing it from sediment (decanting), which involves carefully transferring the wine to separate it from natural sediment (wine stone, dead yeast) and to oxygenate it for purification, stabilization, and flavor development;
transferring the wine to an oak barrel for aging and flavor formation (alternatively, glass or clay vessels with added oak chips can be used);
final bottling of the finished wine (a separate video about bottling and corking is also available on the website).
This approach helps preserve the natural character of the wine, the aroma of the grapes, and a balanced taste without artificial additives.
🌿 Natural Approach and Process Control
Home winemaking is not about haste. It is about attention to detail, clean tools, temperature control, and understanding the processes taking place at each stage.
That is why even a short video can be useful — it shows the real process without embellishments or “secret ingredients.”
🍇 Want to Grow Your Own Grapes?
Although my books do not yet cover winemaking directly, they provide a solid foundation for anyone who wants to grow their own grapes and later use them for homemade products.
If you are interested in practical advice on:
grape planting;
summer care and green operations;
protection from diseases and pests;
choosing grape varieties;
seasonal vineyard work,
I have prepared a series of eBooks based on more than 15 years of personal experience working with vineyards in Central Ukraine.
📘 Learn more in my English-language guides on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FGGMWM8Z
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FN499S2K
The eBooks are also available in Ukrainian and Russian on my website:
👉 https://danilive.org/
🔔 Follow Updates
In this section, I regularly publish videos and practical materials from the vineyard:
variety reviews, seasonal work, short videos, and recommendations based on personal experience.
There is much more useful content ahead — from growing grapes to working with the harvest 🍇
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Ukrainian