From the vine to fine wine (if you know what you're doing)

When Steve Ranere and his uncles set out to revive the family winemaking tradition, they quickly learned the process was more complicated than they had remembered. "All the uncles thought they knew how to do it," Ranere said. "But the first year, it was a disaster, to say the least. We had fruit flies in my aunt's cellar."

So Ranere, a physician from Belmont, took wine-tasting classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, where he learned some basics. The rest he picked up by reading books on the subject.

"We decided if we are going to invest this much time, we had better learn how to do it right," he said.

This winter, he is aging several sophisticated blends of red and white wines in the special cellar he built at his home.

Equipment. Area dealers of winemaking equipment say it costs about $400 to buy the basic equipment: a grape crusher, sieve, press, and barrel, though certainly one can spend much more. Less-expensive winemaking kits that use packaged grape juices and concentrates have grown popular, too, said Roger Savoy, president of Hennessy Home Brew Inc. based in Rensselaer, N.Y., that operates the Modern Homebrew Emporium in Cambridge and another store in West Boylston.

Some winemakers buy fresh barrels every year. They can cost a few hundred dollars for a used whisky barrel to about $700 for a new barrel in oak. Others use their barrels for several years, discarding them only at the first signs of mold, a winemaker's scourge.

Setting. Most home winemakers set aside a few hundred square feet in basements, backyards, and garages for their wine operation. Vinny Capogreco has a backyard wine cellar in East Boston, a little larger than a garden shed and partly sunk into the ground for temperature control. At this time of year, his tabletop grape grinder is covered in plastic and put away on a shelf. His barrel-shaped press, standing about 4 feet tall, is across the room and also covered in plastic until next fall, when he will need it again. The tidy room holds dozens of bottles of earlier vintages and several oak barrels, where this year's wine is slowly maturing.

Preparing the barrels. Winemaking requires a few weeks of hard work spread out from one August to the next. In late summer, winemakers often remove last year's wine from the barrels and bottle it. Then, they prepare the barrels.

"You must make sure it's a good barrel, no mold. It will ruin the wine," said Giovanni LaVita, who makes wine every year in a basement corner of his Medford home.

Anthony Silvestro, owner of American Grapewine Distribution Inc. in Everett, agrees.

"First, we disinfect it like an operating room. Then we go to work," he said.

He embraces modern disinfectant methods shunned by old-school winemakers. He uses a solution made with potassium metabisulfite, which reacts with the natural acids in wine to protect against unwanted bacteria and oxidation.

Capogreco, an Italian immigrant and member of the so-called old school, sticks with traditional methods. He cleans his barrels with peach tree leaves or soda ash, as they do in his hometown of Marina di Gioiosa Ionica, on Italy's Mediterranean coast.

The grapes. The barrels must be ready by late August or September, when freshly harvested grapes begin arriving here. While winemakers debate the methods, they agree that good wine starts with quality grapes. LaVita buys directly from California, where a friend purchases and ships the grapes to Massachusetts. He swears by Barbera grapes. Capogreco is a Zinfandel man.

Silvestro said that regardless of the grape type, the sweeter and stickier the fruit, the better the wine. He said he looks for sugary fruit in bunches that include some raisins.

"My father wouldn't buy grapes without raisins," he said. His father started the distribution and equipment business nearly a century ago. "Run the grapes between your hands. They should be sugary."

It takes 18-22 crates of grapes to make a barrel of wine, according to winemakers, and getting the grapes home can be arduous and expensive. Capogreco said he spends upward of $2,000 to buy enough fresh grapes to make four or five barrels. Half a dozen stores in Massachusetts and a few more online offer juices and concentrates year-round, but fewer establishments sell the fresh product. In addition to Silvestro's operation, the Beer & Wine Hobby in Woburn sells fresh grapes and grape juice each fall.

Fermentation. Capogreco says that after washing the grapes, he puts them through a grinder. Like many home winemakers, he uses a tabletop model that costs a few hundred dollars. Some home winemaking books suggest a stainless-steal potato masher will work as well.

Once the fruit is crushed and the stems removed, the mixture is left to ferment in covered glass containers or plastic tubs. The amount of time varies depending on the type of grape.

At this point, Silvestro kills the grape's wild yeast with a milder form of the same chemical solution used to disinfect the barrels. Then, he adds active dry wine yeast for a more controlled fermentation. He also uses an instrument to measure sugar content and adds distilled water to reduce the sugar level when necessary. The techniques are common practice in modern winemaking, Silvestro said, but old-timers shun them, taking pride in producing wine using old family recipes.

With fermentation begun, the next step is to press the ground-up grapes to separate the juice from the pulp. Basket presses, ranging from tabletop models to larger stand-alones, can handle hundreds of pounds of grapes. They range from a few hundred dollars each to more than $1,000. Instead of a press, a coarse cloth or nylon straining bag can be used to squeeze out the juice.

Fermenting continues for a few weeks, the exact amount of time depending on the wine and the recipe. During the fermentation, winemakers use glass carboys or demijohns and siphon hoses to gradually clarify the liquid by transferring it from one container to another. The procedure, called racking, allows the maker to remove the juice to a new container while leaving the sediment undisturbed at the bottom of the old container.

Eventually, the wine is ready to go into the barrels. Fermentation is likely to continue for several weeks. It is important not to cork the wine until fermentation has stopped or the barrel could explode, Capogreco said. He said he uses plastic cups to loosely cover the mouths of his barrels until the juice stops bubbling and belching liquid over the top of the opening.

The finished product. Once the wine is corked, it needs a cool place where it will sit to clarify and age until the following summer, when winemakers start the process all over again.

Some kits produce wine in six months, Savoy said. LaVita, whose basement in Medford is stocked with vintages dating back to the 1970s, said he ages his wine a minimum of two years. Others leave it in barrels a year before bottling.

"The older the better, Capogreco said. "So it is good to let it wait."