Wine Making Kits: So, How Does The Wine Taste?
Wine making in small batches for personal consumption has been around as long as wine itself. In the United States, personal wine making was brought over from Europe as a family skill in the 18th and 19th century. Although you can’t sell any wine that you produce from home, it’s perfectly legal and is in fact a thriving hobby.
Wine making these days has evolved into a very popular hobby, akin to gardening. There’s a certain amount of pride one takes from growing or producing a consumable product. That said, making wine requires certain equipment, which in my grandfather’s time was rather sizeable and took up a lot of space in the basement. Now, you can buy a wine making kit online and have everything you need to become a burgeoning wine maker in just a few days.
Let’s take a look at what you get when you buy a wine making kit. Typically, most starter kits run anywhere from $125 to $200. You’ll receive a complete set of wine making gadgets and supplies which will include everything you need to produce your first batch of wine.
With a wine making starter kit, not much is left to chance. You’ll be provided a detailed set of instructions, with no knowledge assumed. That actually worked well for us since we knew absolutely nothing about making wine. The entire process takes anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks, from opening the wine kit box to actually drinking the wine.
The Process And The Taste
The process itself is fairly easy, although a bit stop and start. For example, after the first step, basically consisting of mixing ingredients, there’s a 24 hour waiting period to allow the ingredients to settle. Then, another cleansing of sediment after 5 or 6 days, followed by the 4 to 6 week fermenting period.
We chose a simple red table wine as our first effort. We found it palatable and quite drinkable, but nowhere near the quality we’d experienced from small local wineries. However, we were encouraged by our efforts and forged ahead with another batch, feeling wine making was a skill to be perfected by practice.
Our second batch was a fruit wine, an light apricot offering we tried to model after a small winery style we’d encountered on a U.S. wine trail visit. This batch we did share with family and friends. It received an almost universal thumbs up from those who tasted it. For reference, we used about 15 pounds of apricot for our wine, and it leaned almost toward a blush style.
Since then, we’ve tended to focus on fruit wines, because fruit wines are fun and very drinkable, not to mention not as intimidating to make in our basement. And while our little wine making hobby hasn’t prevented us buying a few bottles from legitimate talented wineries, it’s been awfully fun to tell people we’re wine makers!
If you have a little patience and enjoy growing things or producing something all your own, consider wine making. We never thought of ourselves as ever being wine makers, but it’s been fun and a great topic of conversation. You’ll need a willingness to experiment, and a sense of humor for when one of your batches inevitably flops. But, you’ll experience a real sense of pride when someone pays compliments to the winemaker!