Troll Echos

The first step in making your own wine is as simple as sterilizing everything you own, expect to own, think may pass near your wine, things your wine will pass through, sit in, be near, or be able to see from inside large glass containers. It stands to reason of course that if you are trying to give one kind of microbiology the chance to thrive in your grape juice, you should be pretty sure that none of the other kinds you don’t want are hanging around. There are loads of things that can happen to wine with other little baddies growing it it. The least impressive perhaps involve the addition of less desirable flavors to the wine. Some other fun ones include the inadvertent creation of jelly like you would consider putting on your toast in the morning, or simply wine that outright goes bad before you’ve managed to drink it. Thankfully, you have to do some serious work to make wine toxic thanks to the nature of alcohol itself being very effective at killing things off. However failure to deal with cleaning agents properly is about as likely to make poison as it is to destroy the wine entirely, and that’s relatively likely.

Every kit of wine, every book about making wine, and every container of sterilizer stuff known to man will mention, probably repeatedly, that sterilization is so important that your mom being hit by a bus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to skip or interrupt the process. Personally it would stop me, but I may be an oddball among wine makers for that reason. Being relatively well prepared to make wine, or so I thought, I set forth to start making my first wine kit. I read the instructions from top to bottom, as the instructions themselves of course informed me I should do. Upon returning to the top to start actually doing the steps I’d recently read about, I managed to make it as far as step 1.

I read “Sterilize […a small list of wine making stuff…]” and panicked having not done what most wine kit makers likely consider the easiest part of the process, even if the most tedious or time consuming. Now, I fully knew this was coming and I dug out my convenient little pouch of sterilizer stuff, and switched gears to reading its directions instead. “Add 1 Tablespoon to 1 gallon of warm water.” That’s all it said.

Well, that’s really not especially helpful to me. There is an expectation of understanding being made by the funny bag of white powder in my left hand, and I entirely fail to meet that expectation. What comes next exactly? Do I leave it in a jug on the counter and stare at it funny until everything in my house is made magically clean? Do I soak things in it? If so, for how long? How about my big ass plastic primary fermenter? It’s way too big to put into anything else, so perhaps I simply fill it with the stuff and add just shy of 7 tablespoons of my cleaner to it. What about the lid though? Clearly a lid intended to fit on a bucket will not fit into the same bucket, so how can it be sterilized? My brain ran around in circles with all these questions.

After much hopeless thought on the subject, I decided I needed to wait longer before starting. Ask more questions of people that have done it, read more books and web sites, and generally continue to be afraid to start. Perhaps someday I will feel prepared enough to actually proceed.

For some time now I’ve been a member of an excellent wine club called 4 Seasons that costs me around $750 per year and adds loads of interesting varieties of wine to my wine rack. Each shipment is a case of 12 bottles of wine that includes 2 bottles each of 3 types of white and 3 types of red. They are shipped to me one per season, which is slightly misleading since there are actually 5 seasons in a year through this club. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Holiday, and Winter. Thus, with pretty simple math we can figure out that my wine club is 60 bottles a year at roughly $12.50 a bottle.

Several friends of mine enjoy the hobby of making beer or wine at home. This fact got me seriously thinking. Even as a guy that doesn’t care for beer I have to admit that it sounds like fun. I can imagine an infinite variety of beer types since most of the rules of beer fly out the window when you take control of the entire process. I tend to enjoy activities that are slower but the output is of a finer quality. Beer making and bonsai are prime candidates.

I repeat for good measure that I’m not a beer guy, and also that I am a wine guy. Since you can make both beer and wine at home (with a pretty seriously overlapping list of required equipment for those that are considering it) and I like wine, I saw the direction I wanted to go. After a couple of days of research into prices and lists of equipment I finally felt ready to take the plunge into another new hobby.

Like all hobbies this one has a pretty steep initial purchase curve, but unlike many hobbies, it has the potential to save obscene amounts of money in the long run. My initial purchase of things from my local beer and wine hobby store called Brew & Wine Hobby clocked in at right around $340. That purchase however will produce around 60 bottles of wine. Although I will need a few more bottles and corks when I get to the 2nd kit’s completion, those will only cost me right around $36. So the same math as before leads to the conclusion that for the patient and the passionate the price per bottle is a mere $6.27 and that number continues to drop with each kit I make. With the equipment I now own taken out of the picture, a kit of wine tends to produce 30 bottles at anywhere from around $2.25 to $5.00 per bottle.

The best part is I can now cancel my wine club and that within barely more than 2 shipments from my wine club I will have paid off my purchases. The second best part is the ability to make wines that I would never be able to afford or could afford but have a hard time accepting the price. Beyond that there is control and flexibility in what I make. If I find a kit I like, but have an idea about how it might be better, I can tweak to my heart’s content.