Home Brew

Last weekend I picked up a used wine making kit from an ad on craigslist. I've been interested in home brewing for some time, last Christmas I got a book on making wine as a gift and a few weeks ago we went to a part at a friends and he served up his home brewed beer that was quite tasty. So being utterly provoked and having let the opportunity of a used wine kit slip through my fingers a few months ago (these are fairly rare on craigslist), I jumped on this one and brought it home. I also stopped at The Purple Foot home brewing supply store and got some additional supplies and ingredients.

The Purple Foot, however, does not sell wine grapes, and, in fact, wine grapes aren't especially easy to come by in Milwaukee, who knew? There is a winery in Pewaukee, but their website doesn't mention anything about their vineyards, so I have a feeling they buy their grapes from elsewhere. Similarly, Cedar Creek Winery in Cedarburg also do not grow their own grapes (as far as I know). They are partnered with Wollersheim Winery in Prairie du Sac, who do have a vineyard but even so they also buy grapes for some of their wines. In addition to their scarcity, or more likely because of it, wine grapes aren't cheap either. What's a home winemaker to do?

Well, if you're crazy, and I am, you could try growing your own. It just so happens that there is a grape vine growing in my back yard. I didn't plant it, I have no idea what kind of grapes it will produce, nor do I know if they will any good for making wine. If you think this seems like a stupid thing to rely on to make wine from, you'd be right.

Luckily for idiots like me you don't even need grapes to make wine anymore. And I don't mean that in the 'you can make wine from strawberries' sense of the word (even though you can). What I'm talking about is wine grape concentrates. Some crazy genius figured a way to remove most of the sugar and the water from wine grape juice. Then he packaged it up and shipped it all over the place to be sold to dorks like me. All I have to do is reconstitute the concentrate with water, add sugar to my desired level of sweetness and away I go. From two 46oz cans of concentrate you can make yourself 5 gallons of wine. Additionally, you don't have to go through the effort (and cost) of getting a crusher/de-stemmer for your grapes and pressing your must (if you're making red).

So I got a couple of cans of Zinfandel. It seems wrong to even write something like that, but that's what I did.

Now, because I'm a freak, or because I'm scared to attempt this with pretty much no experience and I don't want to run the risk of making garbage wine. Instead of diving in and putting all this stuff together right away, I have delayed the making of my Zinfandel for the moment. I am sort of following these instructions and making a small batch of wine in a repurposed milk jug out of raspberry-apple juice concentrate, some water, and a bunch of sugar. I figure if I can create something semi-decent out of this, then I will start my Zinfandel.

This is all stupid, of course, what will I do if my milk jug wine turns out crappy? Give up? No, I'll go ahead anyway, but maybe I'll have learned something? hopefully? please?

Anyway, hoping that I will be able to make decent table wines, I have created a section on the site called Home Brew, where I'll be posting my recipes and notes as I move forward with this hobby. Maybe we can all learn something, hopefully it won't simply be that I suck at making wine.