The I-did-it-all-by-myself way:
Get the 5 Gallon / 23 liter plastic bucket from your above experiment.
Find 15-20 pounds of something resembling fruit or vegetables.
Remove stems & seeds if possible. If not possible, crush or mash the fruit without damaging the seeds. Seeds do not help the wine and often contain stuff like cyanide or was it arsenic which might be good for your skin but neither help in the taste department. Squishing with your fingers works well, or a potato masher. A continuous juicer also works. If you can remove the stems and seeds you can use a blender to mush the stuff, with a bit of water to keep from burning out the motor.
Dump the ugly mess, called "must", into the plastic bucket.
Simmer around 10 pounds of sugar in water until it's a nice clear syrup and stir it into the fruit. Add some water to almost fill the bucket and mix it all up. Leave 4-6 inches of space for the foam and "cap" to rise under the lid, or you might have a mess on the floor.
Take a cup or two of your must, with enough water, that it's not too thick, make it nice and warm, not hot, pour in an envelope of wine yeast and stir it up. Keep it warm, perhaps in a bucket of hot water, until you need it. I like to do this when I start to mush or juice the fruit, then, by the time I am finished, there's a healthy slug of foaming yeast to give the bucket a running start.
Once a day, for a week or so, stir up the mess with a stick, to break up the "cap".
When the ugly bubbling has slowed down, use sives, collanders or rags to strain the ugly mess. Try to squeeze as much juice as you can out of the pulp before you trash it. This is the worst part of the process. Don't expect clear juice. The stuff should settle to the bottom eventually. Best strainer I've found so far is panty hose. You can put one leg in the other and have a fine, strong mesh that you can hang over a bucket, fill with gallons of goop, and later squeeze
Pour this murky liquid into a new container, add enough water to almost fill the bucket again and put a lid on it. Anything tight enough to keep flies out, is fine. As long as your juice is bubbling, you don't have to worry about bad bacteria, as the bubbles are CO2 which lies like a blanket over the liquid, protecting it. A sheet of plastic wrapped over the bucket is good. If that's really tight, just put a pinhole or two in the sheet, so pressure doesn't build up.
Let it sit undisturbed for a month. A dark and warm place is good. Siphon off the contents leaving the sediment on the bottom, and drink or bottle it. If you're in no rush, siphon it into another large container (this is called "racking") and let it sit for another month or 3. It should get better and gather potency with age.
Some thoughts on:
Water - Boiled water is recommended but not always necessary. If your water is safe to drink, tapwater should be fine except for the chlorine. Chlorine, however, evaporates quickly. Take hot water with a shower-nozzle or out of an aerating tap of some kind and let it sit for little while.
Containers - 4 or 5 gallon buckets are a good size. They can be carried and are large enough to make the job worthwhile. 4 or 5 gallon plastic water-cooler jugs work fine for the secondary fermentation. Of course you could always buy a real glass carboy.
Plastic soft-drink containers with screw-lids work well for storing the final product. They are "free" in just about any size you might prefer. One word of caution: never screw the lids down tight, just leave them loose. I never stop the fermentation with chemicals and the stuff can quietly keep bubbling for a year. This protects it better than a cork but if pressure builds up, you may have a fountain of foam when you open them.
Labels - Glue-stiks are perfect for sticking any kind of labels on your containers.
Ingredients - Berries are about the easiest fruit to handle with almost guaranteed results. So far, my favourite is blackberry wine that is always first beverage-choice by friends. It has a surprisingly high alcohol content and never lasted long. Every year I do several hundred liters, along with another experiment or two.
Extra Ingredients - The only reason to use wine yeast is to ensure that a good yeast gets first crack at fermentation. Without it, it's pot-luck if the natural fruit yeast or a bad one from the air, gets things going. Different types of yeast create differing amounts of alcohol in different temperature ranges but all are in the same ball park. One of these days I'll try to educate myself on the finer points of yeast. 2002 I did 150 Liters of blackberry wine using bread yeast and can't tell any difference between it and the rest, where I used wine yeast.
Occasionally I've used yeast nutrient when I had trouble getting some yeast started. Otherwise I haven't used any chemicals in years.
Sanitation - Sterilizing everything is usually recommended but seems pointless when you consider all the stuff that comes with most fruit (dirt, worms, bugs, pigeon plop . . . ). The yeast will actually digest most of the impurities and convert them to good stuff. Personally, I just wash and rinse things with really hot water only. Dirty containers I keep closed until I wash them, so that they don't dry hard, making washing difficult. Clean containers I keep open so that they stay dry. I rinse everything before each use.
Good Luck
