I'm making home made wine, is it possible that if i made a mistake i could accidentally end up with methanol?!
Answers: i don't think that this is possible. i've tried to research it on my own but haven't come up with anything definitive all i have found out is that sweet fruits and such produce more methanol than grains and that the methanol is not at dangerous levels unless you distill improperly. i have no intention of distilling my wine (for one it's illegal) but i got a little confused with the directions and want to make sure i'm not going to poison myself.
Methanol is the next step alcohol in the distillation process. Wine doesn't use distillation, but rather, fermentation, and methanol is not produced, unless you distill the wine to produce brandy or some other spirits.
Ethanol is made by heating a liquid to a certain temperature (forgot what it was, like 179 degrees F or something) and meticulously watching the thermometer, when it starts to rise, after boiling off the ethanol. That's where you get methanol, if you do not remove the condenser pipe from the first distillate solution.
Back to the wine part. Generally the ill effects of wine making are impurities in the wine itself that cause headaches and other physical maladies, rather than the ethanol.
Now back to alcohol distillation. there are about 5 variants of alcohol, each with a specific temperature gradient that determines which variant it is. in each step, one has to boil off the one type of alcohol, before the boiling temperature increases to the next grade of alcohol. The first type, ethanol, is tolerated by the body, where the next higher grades are not and lead to poisoning.
A reason that there is good moonshine and bad moonshine in that the one watching the temperature during distillation, doesn't pay attention to when one type is distilled off, and the temperature starts rising to the next level.
In the manner of Denatured Alcohol, this starts off being ethyl alcohol (ethanol, the drinkable type), but solvents and gasoline are added into it to make it unfit for human consumption. The same applies to ethanol for vehicle use.
I'm trying to find a good source, but everything I run across keeps saying you shouldn't worry about it since there will be such a negligible amount. Good luck!
No, the worst that can happen is that you will have vinegar.
There is not enough sugar or acid to turn wine grapes into methanol. If you want high-octane stuff, you need to distill things like wine (here making brandy or grappa).
It's a common misconception that making wine or beer is going to make you go blind because you'll end up with methanol. This comes from during prohibition when people were moonshining and bootlegging alcohol. A lot of folks were using denatured alcohol (or worse stuff) from the drug store to add kick to their homebrews. The methanol in the denatured alcohol or other methylated additives is what made people blind and die, not the homebrewing itself. It is boarderline impossible to ever produce methanol, when making homemade wine. Methanol was originally made from wood, and is currently made from natural gas, and is not a byproduct of yeast fermentation.