I started making my own wine in 1971. There was a store called Wine Art and it had just opened and they were selling kits to make wine. They had bottles, French Oak barrels, corks, grape concentrate, glass carboys, fermentation locks, wooden spoons, and stainless steel pots. Every wine making thing you could think of.

You had to be 21, and still have to be 21, to buy beer and wine in the liquor store where I live. But for some reason you could go to the Wine Art store and get all of the fixings to make two and a half cases of wine, 30 bottles, including the grape concentrate, and there was no age requirement. So guess what?

I got a wine making kit. I made wine for a couple of years and the wine I made was pretty good; at least everyone who tried a bottle told me so. I even made a sparkling wine one time; although not on purpose. I was making a white wine and being a newbie at making wine, I did not realize that the yeast had not stopped its fermentation process. It looked done to my untrained eye. (Note: Nowadays home wine makers use sulfites to kill the yeast and stop the fermentation process.) So I started the bottling process on my young white wine and put in the corks. The guy at the wine shop told me that this wine was a wine that I could age for a while and I told all my friends that they could put it away and enjoy it in 6 or 12 months.

Over the next year, more than one friend told me that at some point, usually late at night, they heard this really loud bang, but never could figure out what it was. Later they would discover a cork on the floor and it would dawn on them what had happened. My wine had exploded and evaporated.

After a couple of wine making years, I got married and was living in a really small apartment. While you do not need a warehouse to make wine, it does take up some space and having a small apartment, and having just bought a new couch, my new wife told me something had to go. As it turned out, the couch did not go. It turned out my wine making career / hobby was taking a 20 year sabbatical.

Around 1993, at the urging of a few friends, I began to make home brew; a.k.a. making homemade beer. I was actually pretty good at making my own beer too. In September 1995, my porter took 2nd place and my Red Tail Ale (a pale ale style) took 3rd place at the Colorado State Fair. They were partial mashes and probably could not hold a candle to what home brewers are doing these days. But I was happy with my ribbons.

Going into the brew shop Old West Home Brew one day, I heard the guy working there talking about making wine. At the this time we were drinking Cabernet Sauvignon from J.Lohr that cost around $7 a bottle and we also liked the J. Lohr Chard for around $6. When I heard that he was making a fairly good cab for around $2.00, I became very interested. It was not long before I was making wine all the time and not making any more beer. Making wine was a lot easier; sanitize the equipment, pour in the concentrate, add distilled water and yeast, cover with a fermentation lock and wait for the bubbles to start and stop. Add sulfites, bottle the wine and sit back and drink a fine wine that I had made myself. Old West Home Brew wine making I never had a lot of luck with white wines, though. The whites took a little more work than I was willing to devote. And since the J. Lohr Chard was only $6 back in '93, I did not think it was worth the effort.

One good part of making my own wine from wine kits was that I had the opportunity to try a lot of different varieties of wine; Merlot, Syrah, Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, you name it - and then some. At $2.00 a bottle, why not?

Actually, when I was getting started, the cost of a bottle was more like $7 when you take into account the money I had to lay out to get 6 gallon fermentation bottles, corks, a wine corker, and all of the other unique stuff that I did not use for beer. But after each batch of wine I made, I got to amortize the start up costs over that next batch and each bottle eventually got down to around $2. By then, I had graduated to better wine and the cost grew to about $3 per bottle. Each batch of homemade wine costs around $75 to $90 and you can make just about 30 bottles. You can reuse everything but the corks so once the initial expense is over, your costs go down with each batch you make. You can do the math for how much a bottle will cost.

Of course, back then, I was making wine using grape concentrate. You don't have to use grape concentrate. You can use any kind of fruit. You can use dandelions. You can even make a honey wine also known as mead.

If you do any wine making using a home kit, let me know what progress you are having.

Don't forget to take our Thanksgiving Wine Poll

Say, How's your Italian?



Let me know how things are going with you, O.K.?

Jim Fortune, The BellaOnline Wine Guy

If you have not done so already, why not take a minute and vote for the Bella Online Wine Site on the Chef 2 Chef poll. Last I looked we were #32 but we could be in the top 25 if we have your vote.

Please vote for Bella's Wine Site at Chef2Chef.com.