|
| |
By Kathy Williams and Conrad Young
|
|
| |
|
Kathy and I had been doing a bit of beer brewing for a few months when
she spotted a big box that said “Wine Kit.” Kelly, the brewmaster
at Homebrew Headquarters, told us that it was much easier to make wine
than beer. At this point my ears perked up. Forty bucks later, I was carrying
a box and Kathy was skipping joyfully. We now had all the ingredients
necessary to make great wine. When we got home and opened the box, there
were four packages labeled “1” through “4,” one
big bag of grape juice, some dry yeast, and a short list of instructions.
|
 |
As it turns out making wine really is easy!
The instructions are step-by-step: “…put package
1 in the bucket with 2 quarts of water… then dump the
juice in… then stir and wait two weeks… add package
3, stir, and wait two weeks.” Well, they were written
better than that, but essentially the instructions were very
basic and easy to follow. Much easier than baking Christmas
cookies.
Bottling was loads of fun! We’ve even designed our
own labels and put seals on the top of the bottles over the
corks; it looks really professional! The first kit we tried
was a Barolo, which is a big Italian red wine that is usually
very expensive to buy. We put the scary Mona Lisa label on
it due to the Italian-Mona Lisa connection. The next one was
a Symphony, which is a fruity white wine that you don’t
see much in the store. It was a nice summery wine, and of
course we put the musician label on it. Our third kit is a
Malbec/Shiraz blend that is going right now.
|
|
|
And the wine! Wow, it was so neat to experience the evolution of the flavor
over time. We of course tasted some at the time of bottling.
Each month afterwards, we opened up a bottle and tried it.
About six months after bottling, we brought the Barolo with
us to one of our favorite BYOB restaurants, and it was definitely
worthy of the occasion. Smooth, delicious, yummy… we
are of course very proud of ourselves!
Thanks to the folks at Homebrew Headquarters for making our
experience with winemaking such a great learning experience.
They really go out of their way to answer any questions and
concerns that you might have in this endeavor, and they’re
really nice too!
|
 |
|
|
|
|