wine makeing

[MagTheGrate]

Not quite brewing, but related...

Yesterday 3 friends and I picked 600 pounds of petite syrah wine grapes, crushed and destemmed them. Now we have 60 gallons of must fermenting away nicely. It should yield us about 30 gallons of finished product.

It's good to know people with connections in the temecula wine valley!

My wife's always wanted me to make her some wine... but I never felt right about buying those concentrated juice kits. Just seems better this way!

-Mag

[vendejp]

i thought the same thing mag. i might get my wife a wine brewing kit, but the juice concentrate seems kinda lame.

from what i understand though, it would take a lot of equipment for the grapes.... also, the grapes are only available once a year for a few week period, making it difficult to store, etc.

thus far ive been brewing extract beers, and i feel thats kinda cheating too..... but i dont know if i have the time/$/space/etc to get the necessary stuff to mash grains and all that.

30 gallons will give you an awful lot of wine.... hope you have lots of friends to give them away to.

[michaewa]

I've made a few of the kits with my girlfriend, we're getting ready to bottle the first later this week. The kits got very high reviews from the owner of the LHBS, but you have to consider the source since he is the one selling them.

Maybe when yours is done we can trade and grade to see what the difference is in the final product.

[kevin]

I bottled my first kit Reisling and it tasted pretty good. Once I get a couple more kits under my belt then I'll try with real fruit. Also I sent back my two handed corker and exchanged for the floor model well worth it.

[michaewa]

The LHBS here has a yearly deal where they order grapes from Lodi Vinifera, you can get lots of different styles, and get whole grapes or juice.

I ordered 6 gal of the juice, didn't want to invest all the extra $$ for the mashers, etc. They said the primary difference is that wine made with grapes vs. juice has more color b/c of the skins. They also said if you bought whole grapes you can get more than one batch out of them.

Maybe next year.

[vendejp]

speaking of LHBS comment on wine making, they said that with the kit (~80-90 bucks in ingredients) you can make about 24 bottles or something (so about $4 a bottle).

but... they said that the quality is that of what you could expect to pay $35 a bottle for. what do you think?

[mcarlson74]

My wife is also interested in starting to make wine. So we went in and was talking with the owner of our LHBS and he was saying that he heard of about 4 wineries that were using these kits to produce wine. Now I'm from Napa and no winery worth it's salt is going to make wine from a kit. I was wondering if anybody else had heard this too?

[vendejp]

im sure they dont use a kit, but since you can only get grapes during a particular season, maybe they buy large quantities of juice made from the grape season.

[kevin]

There are many different wine kits, some have more juice than others. The kits that contained about 4 gallons of juice cost about $30 more, but then I would assume a $75 kit equals about a $10-$15 bottle of wine. I would also bet that a true winery adds more water than you might think. My first kit I bottled 29 bottles or about $1.55/bottle. I would bet it compares to a $5 store bought bottle. Also the store and delivery system to get that wine to the store add markup to the wine price.

Another thing I did was a little research on these kits and they mention they buy grapes at the right time (?) then de-stemmed, crush, sterlize and then vacuum pack them for maximum freshness.

[Tweek]

Unfortunately for us home fermenters, wine is not as easy to create as beer. That is to say that your chances of being as impressed with your winemaking as you are with your beer making is not too good. I do both and my beer is consistently better than most of the stuff you could buy in the store if not all of it. My wine however does not hold a candle to any of my favored wineries. This is largely to due with the fact that as home wine makers we dont have access to the quality of fruit/juice that makes the wine that we love. Great wine begins in the wineyard.

That being said, you can make some very good wines from juice and or concentrate, I have made some decent wine from kits. I think kits and juice is a great way to go to hone your skills. Fresh fruit is about 2x the cost of fresh juice or kits not to mention the equipment cost or rental fees. Also if you mess up and create 5 gallons of crap it was only a 80 dollar mistake instead of a 200+ dollar one.

I have a lot of friends who make wine at the professional level for a living and they are always impressed by my beer. They say that a good beer maker can make excellent wine but that it does not necessarily go the other way around. Sanitation is not nearly as in of a concern in wine making.

Cheers!

[S.F.B.]

I am doing wine for the first time this year but on a much smaller scale than Mag. I have a few vines going in the back yard. One variety yielded 20 lbs and the other 16. I have started the 16 lbs and plan to start the other batch as soon as I can block out the time. The batch that is going will give me about 2-3 gal and the 2nd should come in at 3-4.

[jsmurphy]

I've thought about winemaking with my wife, and there is a shop just down the street from my office. They sell the kits with juice and have a huge selection. The best part is, it's a brew on premises set-up, so I don't need to invest in a lot of equipment. The owner gave me a couple of half bottles to try and they were pretty good.

But, as long as Trader Joe's still has the Charles Shaw in stock for 1.99/bottle, I think I'll wait.

[SLOSHomebrewers]

Originally posted by Tweek
Unfortunately for us home fermenters, wine is not as easy to create as beer.

Wrong.

Vineyards are producing far more fruit than can possibly be processed by the wineries. There is fruit rotting on the vine, more vineyards coming online in the next few years, and new vineyards planted every day.

Even though this was not an ideal growing year, there are a lot of excess, good quality grapes out there.

Contact growers, go to farmers markets, make new friends, you will be amazed how easy it is to get a couple hundred pounds of good quality grapes for a song!

Making wine is the easiest thing I have ever done. In one day (shorter than an all grain brew day) you crush, take sugar levels, take acid levels, adjust acid, sulfate, and pitch yeast. One more day for the press a week later, and all you have to do for the rest of the year is wait.

Kit wines are thin and win all their praise in that they are not offensive. If you want real quality and flavor depth remember that you have the luxury of watching the fermentation in a very small batch that Gallo and Bronco (Shaw) don't have.

Charles Shaw isn't fit to even top up my barrels with.
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[Tweek]

Perhaps you misunderstood my point. Wine is incredibly easy to make. In fact to have an end product that can be called wine is a task so simple that I am sure anyone can do it. The real trick is to make something exceptional. If you are making wines that you deem exceptional than my hat is off to you. The wines that I judge mine off of are so far superior to my own. This is due to many factors, not the least of which is fruit, which if you have a good contact that is great but I assure you the great fruit is not coming from the farmers market or your buddies hobby vineyard in his backyard, but from vineyards that are managed by professionals who are going to use it to make their own wine.
Again I am not saying that one cannot make good wine or even great wine at home, what I was trying to convey is that it is rare that a homewinemaker makes a vintage that is truely cream of the crop int eh same way that beer can be made at home. The best beers I have ever had have been homebrews, teh best wines have always been profesional. This is all opinion of course and if you like your wine better than all others than I am jealous.

[Beerconnoisseur]

As with beermaking, in home winemaking, you have the option of trying several different things with samples of your product that would be cost-prohibitive for a large scale winery. In many cases, this will give you results that are unique, compared to what is available commercially.... which, come to think of it, is why I homebrew beer to begin with!

Personally, I've never brewed a drop of wine at home, so I certainly don't claim to be an authority. Yet, MoreBeer.com has a fairly extensive set of wine kits and equipment available, and they seem to be adding more equipment along these lines. I'd be quite surprised that people would be spending $600+ on crusher/destemmers and variable volume fermenters, if there were *NO* difference between homebrewed wine, and what one can buy off-the-shelf at the supermarket.

But, this is just my two cents worth. Adjust for inflation as you will. :D

[Fast_Eddy]

I'll throw in my two cents here...

I've heard it stated more than once that wine is about the grapes not the vintner and beer is about the brewer not the grain. Which is to say that the ingredients available to all brewers are roughly equivalent and this allows home brewers to meet and/or surpass the quality of any commercially available beer. But the grapes available to vintners(normally) are not even close to the quality of grapes produced at vineyards. That's fundamentally why great(even very good) wines come from very specific regions with very specific climates.

I've never made wine either but this seems to be an empirically observable concept....

As previously stated "But, this is just my two cents worth. Adjust for inflation as you will. "

[MagTheGrate]

These particular grapes came from Cilurzo winery in Temecula... Makers of great wine imho!

with some connections and provideing the labor for picking, they only cost us $0.50/pound. $300 total... not bad for 30 gallons of wine.

Then we managed to borrow a destemmer/crusher for FREE! woot! that's the price I love. The same guy is gonna loan us his bladder press in two weeks.

-Mag

[hades_ibex]

Just to make a late addition to this thread.... I just bottled a Pinot Noir and a Reisling from kits. These are the first wines I've made. They are already pretty good. Gonna age them for a bit tho. My supplier says that the best grapes are reserved for big commercial buyers, so long term contracts can be agreed upon. A home winemaker who buys from the vineyard would take his spot in the queue behind the commercial entity that buy grapes for their kits.

[SLOSHomebrewers]

It depends on how good a friend the vineyard owner is.

usually 100 lbs of grapes is no big deal and you won't be taking food off his/her table.

Especially in this shit economy.

It is true that wine is made in the vineyard, but you do have a lot more control in small batches.

My Zinfindel last year came from the same vines that are sold to a very, very large producer. These vines are grown in a low-lying area, next to a river, with deep fertile soil, no irrigation, no fertilization, and no pest abatement. I was able to overcome a few of the shortcomings of the fruit using the old trick of hitting it with a lot of oak. It's the style these days in California anyway. I also waited until the fruit had hit an astronomical sugar content. The extra alcohol takes the pressure off a lot of the other aspects of the wine.

This is only one case study.

Do not be afraid to try new things. It's fun and challenging.
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[bierboy]

Originally posted by vendejp
i thought the same thing mag. i might get my wife a wine brewing kit, but the juice concentrate seems kinda lame.



Don't be fooled. The wine kits make excellent wine. I can't keep enough of it in house.