Theory vs practice

One of the curious things that I still don't quite understand, is the difference between the actual process of wine making as I am seeing it, and the "theory" I read. This may be in part because a lot of the resources on wine making in the English language are about making wine from fruits other than grapes... not too surprisingly since I guess grapes are not as widely grown in family orchards in the English-speaking world as in mainland Europe.  And from what I've read, it seems that grapes are really the perfect fruit from which to make wine (surprise surprise)- to make wine from every other fruit requires addition of something to the process, e.g. yeast, and perhaps more attention to detail.

One example is sterilisation. I read that everything should be perfectly sterilised.  In practice nothing at all is sterilized, there were lots of flies around during the pressing stage, and most of equipment is hardly what one would call hygenic (in fact, best not to think about hygiene at all).  The assumption seems to be that anything nasty simply gets killed off during the fermentation, or removed during racking.

Another is keeping air and fruit flies away from the wine, to prevent oxidisation.  I read that it's critical to use airlocks that keep the air (oxygen) out from the wine but release gases from the fermentation (Carbon dioxide).  Well, perhaps it is, but we haven't used those yet. I think we should be, but the ones we had are old and cannot be cleaned. Nobody seems too bothered about it though, although I'd feel a lot happier if we would simply buy some new ones.  The hole at the top of the white wine barrels was just covered over for a few weeks, and now the bung has been put in... but only loosely.  The fruit flies do seem interested in the red juice I put into the plastic container - but not in the other wine in the barrels.

On the other hand, it can be that all this will produce a wine but not a terribly great one.

Well, let's see... this year is for learning and next year is when I would like to start experimenting.