I’ve been meaning to take a crack at making wine for awhile now, with the intentions to making about 2-3 batches a year. Recently, Midwest Supplies did a Groupon* for a wine starter kit, which was a deal too good to pass up. The deal included the basic home wine making kit (including a 6 gallon Better Bottle secondary fermenter) , a choice of two different ingredient kits (Coastal Red or Coastal White), and a $25 voucher towards a future purchase, all for about $82, including shipping. Needless to say, this was a crazy good deal.
I ended up going with the Coastal Red kit. From the perspective of a homebrewer, making wine from a kit was pretty straight forward. “Brew day” was much shorter since it essentially entails mixing up some water, the grape juice, and nutrients in a fermenter and pitching the yeast. There are few more steps that you have to take along the way that you don’t have to do with brewing, like degassing and stabilizing, but other than that, it was pretty straight forward and the end result came out pretty tasty. If you can follow a cooking recipe, you can make wine with kits like this. I think I may do a Malbec as my next kit, but time will tell. Here are a few pictures from my first wine:
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| Sample of the wine at bottling time. |
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| Left: my Fresh Hop IPA in the secondary, Right: my first wine in the secondary. |
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| The finished result of my first wine about 3 months after bottling. |
*Note: Midwest has done a very similar deal on Groupon and on Living Social for a homebrewing kit. For someone looking to get into the hobby, it’s a fantastic deal. I imagine they will be running the deal for the wine starter kit again also.
Song of the Day: “Worlds Apart” by Times of Grace
Beer of the Day: Liefmans Goudenband
