Our first and foremost priority at The Wine Maker's Toy Store is make sure your first batch of wine is not only a success, but a fun and rewarding venture. To assist you in the purchase of your starter package, whether you buy from us or another store, the list below provides the basic equipment you need to make wine with most of the Winexpert, Mosti Mondiale or RJ Spagnols wine ingredients kits (Certain of the specialty kits like Port, Sherry, Ice Wine Style and Champagne use a 3-gallon carboy, but all of the other pieces of equipment are the same). If you want to make your wine from scratch, please look at our Required Equipment page.

Starter Packages from Fine Vine Wines, LLC, The Wine Maker's Toy Store.

The following is the list of minium equipment for making wine with a wine ingredients kit:

Starting at the top of the list, the 7.9 Gallon Primary Fermenter with Drilled & Gasketed Lid is usually a food grade plastic bucket. A bucket is used as the primary fermenter as you want a wide top to allow plenty of oxygen for the yeast in their growth stage. You also want a primary fermenter at least 25% larger than the secondary fermenter to allow plenty of room for the fermentation process. During the rapid fermentation phase, the yeast create carbon dioxide which raises the level of your wine to more than 6-gallons. When this phase is finished the level will drop back to the 6-gallon mark. If you container is too small, you could find yourself cleaning up a mess!

The next item is the carboy and the the 6-gallon size is MANDATORY. I cannot stress this point enough! Almost all of the Winexpert, Mosti Mondiale and RJ Spagnols wine ingredient kits are designed to be made in a 6-gallon carboy, NOT 5-gallon. If you make a 6-gallon wine kit to only 5 gallons, you will throw off the balance and adversely affect the quality of your finished wine PLUS you will be throwing away perfectly good wine.

A drilled stopper and airlock are used together with the carboy to allow carbon dioxide to escape from the carboy while keeping oxygen out.

The hydrometer is used to measure the amount of sugar in your wine. It is important to make sure your wine has the correct beginning specific gravity (S.G.). Depending on the type of wine, the starting S.G. will be anywhere from 1.050 to 1.110. The kit instructions will tell you what the starting S.G. for your particular kit should be. Secondly, as the fermentation progresses, you will use the hydrometer to tell you when to perform the next steps.

A racking cane, also called a siphon tube, is a rigid piece of plastic with a cap at the bottom. You need this to transfer (rack) your wine from vessel to vessel. You attach the siphon tubing to the cane, place the cane in your wine and the tubing in the empty vessel. Then you start a siphon to rack the wine into the clean vessel. The cap at the bottom of the cane is to minimize the amount of sediment transferred as the primary reason for racking is to remove the sediment from your wine.

At some point you are going to want to bottle your wine, thus the need for the bottle filler. The bottle filler attaches the end of the tubing and has a trigger at the bottom to start and stop the flow of wine as you move from bottle to bottle.

The plastic spoon or paddle serves 2 purposes. One to mix your wine concentrate and water when you begin and when you add the stabilizers and fining agents. The second purpose is remove the carbon dioxide (CO2) from your wine. This is referred to as "de-gassing your wine".

Due to the small neck on the carboy, it is extremely difficult to take an S.G. reading by putting the hydrometer directly into the carboy. The easier way is to draw out a sample with the wine thief and put it into a test jar. Then you can put the hydrometer into the test jar to obtain the S.G. After you get your reading, you can pour the sample back into the carboy. You can also use the wine thief to draw a sample for a taste test.

Obviously, you will need bottles for your finished wine. Most people use the standard wine bottle which is 750 ml and get a little over 30 bottles. You will also need new corks as used corks WILL leak.

The last item on this list is a corker. You could try a mallet, but you will find the corker is much easier and less time consuming. You will find there are many different corkers on the market and included in starter kits. My only recommendation is to avoid the plastic models. From my experience, they are not as easy to use as the all metal varieties.

How are our starter packages different?

1. Cleaning and SANITIZING is extremely important, as we emphasize over and over, again. Most packages only include a cleansing agent. We include Potassium Metabisulfite (as recomemded by all wine kit manufacturers) for sanitizing, after you clean.
2. Most starter packages sold by other retailers include 3/8" racking canes, bottle fillers and tubing. Although that size works well for beer making, the flow rate is extremely slow for racking and bottling wine compared to their 1/2" counterparts. The flow rate for the 1/2" tubing is 77% faster than the 3/8" and 150% faster than the 5/16". For this reason, we include the 1/2" size in all of our wine making starter packages, except the Competitor's Package.
3. We include a spigot with our buckets. The spigot makes the first racking (transfer) much easier and will generally transfer more wine than a siphon. It is also very easy to determine when to stop the transfer so you get all the wine and leave most of the sediment behind.
4. We include a floating thermometer with all but the Competitor's Package. It is important to control the temperature of your wine. If you wine is too cold, the yeast will go to sleep or slow your fermentation down. If the wine is hot, your fermentation will proceed to fast and result in lost flavor or if the wine gets too hot, the yeast will die. The optimum temperature for most wine kits is 70-76 degrees with an allowable range of 65-80 degrees. The better job you do at keeping your wine in the recommended range, the better wine you will produce.
5. At various times in the wine making process, you will need to take a sample of your wine to measure the progress of fermentation. This is done with a hydrometer. As indicated above, it is extremely difficult to get a reading by putting the hydrometer in the carboy. The best way is too take a sample and place it in a test jar large enough to accomodate the hydrometer. To make this task easy, we include a Wine Thief/Test Jar Combo. As the name says, it doubles as a wine thief and test jar by allowing you to put the hydrometer inside the wine thief. When you are done, you can release the wine back into the carboy (assuming you sanitized it first!) or into a glass for tasting.

OTHER USEFUL ITEMS:

The following items are very useful and are included in most of our starter packages: