The Elfin Blog

Last Christmas my wife got me a wine kit as a present. Now I’ve made a few batches of beer in my time, and even a (mediocre) cider, but I’ve never made wine. And so the kit sat, first on the kitchen floor, and then on a shelf in my basement. For almost a year the kit sat, calling to me, but not loud enough to be answered. Oh I had my reasons. I’d need to buy a bigger carboy (the kit makes six gallons, and I only have five gallon carboys), or I didn’t have time, or I’d need to get a corker. But with the approach of Christmas this year, and a little time off, a figured I’d give this wine thing a try.

First of all, the process of starting a wine is heck of a lot easier than making beer. There’s no brew pot involved, no boiling, no hops or grains, and no waiting for your yeast pack to expand. In fact, the only part that requires real effort is the cleaning and sanitizing of the equipment. Now, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the act and art of brewing beer. That’s why I do it. And if I compare glasses to goblets, I enjoy drinking beer more than wine. But over the past year or so I’ve become interested in all aspects of zymurgy, and that inlcudes wine. I am simply interested to see how this all turns out.

Another thing that has piqued my interest is the cost benefit of home wine making. See, I drink relatively expensive commercial beers, so homebrewing doesn’t save me all that much money, especially since I currently only brew in five gallon batches. The benefits of homebrewing, in addition to my simple enjoyment of the hobby, are that the beer I brew is generally fresher and much better than the beer I buy. The price, however, is only slightly less than just going out and buying two cases of beer. Making wine, on the other hand, has the potential to save me a great deal of money. Consider that my wife paid about $60 for the wine kit, a nice Pinot Noir from a very reputable company. The kit aims to produce 30 - 750ml bottles of wine, so that’s a cost of $2.00 a bottle. The commercial wines my wife and I normally consume, not taking into account the occaisional “special bottle,” range in price from around $8.99 a bottle to say $15.99. To buy and drink 30 bottles of wine at even just $8.99 a bottle would cost us $269.70, and that’s not counting tax. So making my own wine could save my wife and I hundreds of dollars year.

Finally, like brewing beer, I enjoyed the activity involved in the process of starting this wine. I find the manual labor involved in cleaning and sanitzing relaxing. I like to think about the potential problems and solutions that come with fermenting a solution of something into something else. I like to think about all those little yeast cells reproducing and then feasting on all the sugars present in the must (or wort), like little happy workers whose job it is to eat and flatulate. Who wouldn’t want a job like that?

It will be interesting to see how this Pinot turns out. Perhaps I’ll add winemaking as a companion to homebrewing. Even if the wine turns out poorly, I’ve enjoyed the process, and that’s really the point.