Comments on: Home brewing, yes. But where’s the home winemaking?

By: Tomer

Tomer — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 21:50:57 +0000

Of beer needed to age a whole year (a minimum, even when making fruity rose, syrah , merlot, or sangiovese)
after the 3-5 weeks brewing period, no one would be brewing at home.

But on the other hand you have cider and mead makers (which also takes months untill its ripe to drink) participating in home making.
Perhaps its because homewinemakers have premium wine to compere and strive to while cider and mead makers just do their thing to produce a good drink. who cares if it doesnt taste smooth or complex like a good english cider.

By: Nate

Nate — Wed, 02 May 2012 02:15:06 +0000

My retired hippie parents are making wine – merlot and elderberry so far. The jury is out but I am looking forward to a taste.

By: Todd - VT Wine Media

Todd - VT Wine Media — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:58:00 +0000

Doc,
Each autumn for the last four years, I have harvested cold hardy varieties; a small amount of fruit from VT vineyards (primarily Marquette and La Crescent grapes), but my biggest hauls come from the Cornell Trial Vineyard in Willsboro, NY on the west coast of Lake Champlain, where my extended family resides, and I have been volunteering with maintenance and data collection. It is always a dice roll, as to what varieties I can bring home, but have included Frontenac Gris, St. Croix, Leon Millot, more Marquette and La Crescent, Louise Swenson, Petit Amie, La Crosse, ES-6-16-30 (Adalmiina in Finland) and NY76. Despite what bad rap hybrids have in general, I have seen them make very interesting wines.
But that is not enough, for the last 3 springs we have brought in a few hundred pounds of Chilean red fruit (Carmenere, Malbec, Cabernet Sauv) though the regional market in Hartford,CT, as well as containers of white juice (Sauv Blanc, Chardonnay, Viognier).
If you are interested, you are welcome to come up and help with the hand-destemming.

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:10:30 +0000

I make wine and can attest to its allure, and to reasons why fewer people do it. The biggest problem is where to get the juice. I’m fortunate to live near a winery that will call when the crush comes in – I take my bucket, and they fill it from the firehose. But otherwise, it’s necessary to buy a kit, which ranges upwards from $45 for a nominal yield of 30 bottles. The most expensive kits can get close to $200, which means that you’re paying about half retail for comparable quality (I like what I make, but there’s no way it would fetch more than $10-15 at retail). If it goes bad, you’re out a fair amount of cash.

The second problem is what to do when you’ve finished. A 6-gallon batch of beer can be done in by two people in a month – 30 bottles of the same stuff can be a formidable undertaking,unless you want to have a lot of parties. I do 2 white and 2 red batches a year. My wife and I drink a bottle every two nights, so unless I give it away, there’s not much room to explore other things, or pairings different foods.

By: gabe

gabe — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:14:30 +0000

p.s. you can probably make a growler of homebrew for about $4

By: gabe

gabe — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 02:35:25 +0000

Dr. V – glad you’ve been inspired! All it takes is a couple of friends and a little moxie. In the past 3 years, my two friends and I have produced nearly 50 batches of beer! There were definitely some stinkers in the first dozen batches or so; but these days, it really is as easy as cooking dinner. I suggest a group of 2-3 people. 1 person is not enough, 4 people is too many.

Now, as for making wine…that’s a whole ‘nother story. I’ve been doing that for 4 years, and I feel like I’ve barely started…

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:17:25 +0000

Part of the reason several old vine Central Valley vineyards survived prohibition were the train car loads of fresh grapes they sent east to the Italian community when commercial wine production was illegal, that and the Catholic Church were their only markets for years, most vineyards were grubbed up and fruit trees planted to be replaced by vines again in the 1870 and 80.

By: G Claassen

G Claassen — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:35:19 +0000

In reply to your questions: What, in your experience, motivates home winemakers? And are there any differences in motivation for those who use grapes as opposed to kits? Home winemakers are motivated by several factors; most of them love wine, and want the experience of making it themselves and understanding the processes involved. There are often differences between people that use fresh grapes as opposed to kits — by analogy, there are brewers that will only brew whole grain and those happy with extracts, cheesemakers that will only make cheese with fresh milk versus regular homogenized, pasteurized milk from any grocery store, and people that will only drink French wines/local wines/sulfite free wines compared to those that like to experience as many different styles and world influences as possible.

Overall, anyone that has tried a wine kit has been very pleased with the results, even if they have made wine from fresh grapes previously. Conversely, I’ve met many more people that made or tasted very bad wines made from fresh grapes, because there are so many ways it can go wrong. At that point for many it is the challenge of making something good, compared to knowing you are going to get a good quality result with wine kits. I’m happy either way — and I make my cheese with grocery store milk, too.

By: Dr. Vino

Dr. Vino — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:38:29 +0000

Matt – Thanks for the comment. In the spirit of innovation and experimentation, have you heard about a new beer from Dogfish Head called “noble rot”? It gets half of the fermentable sugars from (some botrytized) grapes, the other half from grains. Apparently the TTB didn’t have too much of a problem with it!

http://j.mp/wkk766

Todd- Yes, too bad we didn’t say hi in person! Good luck with your fermentations…where do you source your fruit from?

Cabfrancophile – Yes, time, cost, freshness of grapes, and technical know-how all can conspire to make home wine-making more difficult, if not impossible. Get a shot of Gabe’s beer-making confidence!

By: Dr. Vino

Dr. Vino — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:24:12 +0000

Mark Ryan – Thanks for observation. Again, regional variations seem to be in play. How’s the wine coming?

Gabe – you confidence in beer making is contagious! Makes me want to try it. But then again, I can get a growler of delicious craft beer at my local store for $12…

G Claassen- Thanks for stopping by. What, in your experience, motivates home winemakers? And are there any differences in motivation for those who use grapes as opposed to kits?

Dave S. – ha, a silver lining!

Laura and Lee – exactly what I mentioned in my first comment. And here’s Howard Goldberg weighing in on Twitter with a similar view:

Out of sight, Italian immigrants’ descendants have made wine in Brooklyn and Staten Island homes since the 1900′s.

By: Dr. Vino

Dr. Vino — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:05:02 +0000

Terrific comments on this thread while I was out of pocket yesterday!

Blake – Thanks for your observations from California. Here in the northeast, a lot of the people I see or hear about making wine at home are over 50 and are first- or second-generation immigrants, often Italian and don’t have large basements. And I’m not sure that they would claim that their wine was better than store-bought wine, or if that’s their goal. Maybe it’s more of an ancestral connection or a bit of the community aspect that the Slate piece touched on.

Clearly an ethnography of home wine makers in America, especially with regional variations, would be terrifically interesting!

By: Letizia

Letizia — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:28:46 +0000

Hi, My uncle always makes his own wine….for years and years…And it’s really good! He lives in the north of Italy. Nowadays I guess we don’t have the time to do it ourselves….we’re always ‘busy’ right ?!

By: Laura

Laura — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:45:29 +0000

in my experience, older european immigrants are the only people I saw daring to make wine at home, and doing it in a simple very traditional method. For me, the abundance of good, budget-friendly wines makes diving into home winemaking doesn’t seem worth it

By: Cabfrancophile

Cabfrancophile — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 04:38:42 +0000

I like wine more than beer, but certainly would attempt beer making before wine. The biggest issue with wine seems to be that to avoid oxidation, you need a significant volume. So forget about the labor, cost and technical hurdles, and you simply need to make a bunch of it. And chances are it’s not going to be as good as commercial wine, not the first run or two. Not something I want to be stuck drinking when the pros can do better.

Beer is something you can produce in small batches in different styles. Experimentation or off-batches, no biggie. You can mix it up without much risk.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:41:55 +0000

I’ve been making both beer and wine at home and I think they’re both fairly easy to do, obviously beer is a lot faster to make than wine so I think that appeals to people more. But you can make wine pretty quickly if you use kits or if you make sweet wine. I know that sweet wine is frowned upon by snooty wine drinking people but I’m not asking them to drink my wine. Sourcing grapes is hard if you don’t live on the west coast or upstate new york but you can make good wines out of almost any fruit. I’ve made an excellent wine from rhubarb, it tastes pretty similar to riesling. And you can make a good dry red wine from elderberries.

I think the reason why home wine making isn’t as hipster friendly is because wine is (for the most part) very much an agricultural product. You get good fruit, your ferment the juice and you drink it, the crafting of the wine was done in the vineyard, you just gave it a place to ferment. Beer, on the other hand, is something that can be crafted at home, by developing recipes, determining a hop schedule, adjusting mash temperatures or methods, picking from 50 different yeast varieties, etc.

Also, like Dave S. wrote it’s very easy to fail at making wine, especially if you’re trying to make a dry red wine. So people try, fail, and go back to making beer, not realizing that wine doesn’t have to be dry, that it doesn’t have to be made from grapes, that there’s no rule saying you can’t add spices, or blend fruits together, or use ale yeast, or hell even mix it in with wort and make some crazy wine/beer hybrid! There’s a lot of creativity to be discovered in wine making and people have barely scratched the surface of what can be done to push the limits (like so many are doing with beer right now).