Hi there, it is Saturday and this is the day that I will be making my first wine. Well, hopefully it will turn out like wine. For my first try, I will be doing a very simple Apple Wine and the recipe consists of just apple juice which you can easily find in the local stores.However, the apple juice must not contain any preservatives or it will not work as the preservatives will kill off the yeast before it can convert the sugars to alcohol. So, if you are thinking of making your own wine with the juice, the first thing you must look out for is whether there is any preservatives in the juice. I have purchased the apple juice from either Shop n Save or NTUC and in all, it cost me about S$50. Quite reasonable for a wine, right? I also took advantage of any offers when I purchased the juice, so I managed to save a little more. Note that this will be more like a Cider than a real wine, you will need to expect some cidery aftertaste. The word “Apfelwein” is German and thus not to be taken literally.

The recipe for the Apple Wine (Apfelwein) is as follows:

1. 5 litres Ceres Apple Juice
2. 5 litres Marigold Apple Juice
3. 5 litres Harvey Fresh Apple Juice
4. 5 litres VeGood Fuji Apple Juice
5. 4 litres Cyprina Apple Juice
6. 1kg Dextrose
7. 2 pieces Cinnamon sticks
8. Cotes des Blancs Yeast 5 grams (2 packs)

Yes, the recipe is that simple! Everything except the yeast can be found in your local supermarket. You can substitute the glucose for dextrose if you can’t find it. You can purchase the yeast online from eBay. It took about 8 days for the yeast to arrive and it cost like S$13 for 10 packs. Much much cheaper than if you purchased from the local home brew store. But the advantage of buying from the local homebrew store is that the yeast should be viable. Remember, if you buy the yeast from online stores, they will have to travel long distances through harsh weathers to reach you. So the freshness and the quality of the yeast is not assured. However, for me, I took the risk and bought 10 packs from a store on eBay. Their URL is The Bruhaus.

I guess some of you guys might be more interested in the pictures. Well, without further ado, I will start with the pictures!

Aha! All the ingredients necessary to make Apfelwein (except the yeast)! We have 24 litres of no-preservatives apple juice, 1 kg of dextrose as well as cinnamon sticks.

Ceres Apple Juice. That’s right, it is 100% pure apple juice. The colour of the Apple Juice in the picture is much lighter than the colour of the actual apple juice I pour from the pack. What gives?

Cyprina Apple Juice. Yes, again it is 100% natural apple juice. The most costly of the lot. It is about S$2.25 per pack. Smells extremely nice!

Marigold Apple 100% juice. Marigold, probably one of the most famous brands in Singapore. Everywhere you turn, you will see some sort of advertisement from Marigold. Not sure whether this is a good thing or not, but it was on offer when I went to the store a few days back. I got it for S$1.65 per 1 litre pack. Pretty cheap. And surprisingly, it smells quite nice too.

Ya, it’s the VeGood Fuji Apple Juice. It comes with “100% Vitamin C  Daily Intake*”. Not sure what that means? Well, that makes both of us. Anyway, I read through the package and it comes without any preservatives, so this will go into the must as well. However, I didn’t smell any of the Fuji apple sweetness when I poured the juice out.

Harvey Fresh 100% crushed apple juice. I tasted this apple juice before and it tasted damn great. Probably one of the best tasting apple juice I have ever tried before. Not sure how it will as a wine though.

That’s 1 kg of dextrose! Yes, this will ensure that anyone drinking the Apfelwein will be drunk in warp speed. Come on, don’t tell me that you drink wine to become more sober? That’s like “jumping off from a 25 storey building because you want to touch the sky”!

From what I read, the resulting Apfelwein will be pretty dry and tart, so adding a few sticks of cinnamon into the fermenter will ensure that there will at least be some sweetness.

Yes, it is Cinnamon Stick.

Sorry for the blurred pictures. Not too sure what happened. Maybe I got too excited when I was doing the wine. That’s two packets of Cote des Blancs dry wine yeast.

That’s me rehydrating the yeast. Just use a sanitized container, add some clean water and then pour the packets of yeast into the water. Give it a gentle stir and allow it to rest. Oh, you will need to cover it as well so as to prevent bacteria or other spores from contaminating the yeast. You don’t want that to happen!

After about 25 minutes of pouring the apple juice into the fermentor, I am all done. Took me quite a while because I wanted to ensure that the juice is not split out so I poured slowly.

A close up view of the must. Well, the colour is not what I expected but, hey it should be correct. I really doubt that there is anything which can go wrong with the recipe. Perhaps that’s just the colour of a lot of apple juice.

After pouring in the rehydrated yeast, I then cover the fermentor and will allow it to ferment for about 4 weeks. Hopefully by then it will become a hard cider and kick a lot of drinkers’ asses. I am keeping my fingers cross. I will also be spending a lot of time sniffing the airlock. I read that this will give off a lot of sulfur which reminds people of “rhino farts”. Hopefully since I have added to the must some yeast nutrients, there won’t be any “rhino farts”. Don’t want the neighbours complaining.

And this is the end of my first Wine Making adventure. I will keep you guys informed about the outcome of this Apfelwein. Please take note that the original recipe was taken from Edwort’s award winning Apfelwein recipe. Basically it is the same except with the different apple juice as well as yeast. Credit goes to Edwort.