Just signed up to begin making 25-30 bottles at a local beer/wine making supply store. Pretty excited about the process. Hopefully I'll document it as I go along. I chose to make a red wine, and make shiraz.

Good luck! I've always wanted to try this... but have never had the time.

leave it to the wineries or prison toilets.

I believe in the prisons around here they call it skunk juice and make it with moldy bread and garbage bags.

Don't be like my friend's dad... he brings his wine or beer that he makes to every family vacation, and it's all pretty terrible, and they have to invent reasons why they had to go buy a case of Corona.

Nah. I'll give away most of the bottles, but for the most part I'm treating this as an educational process so I can eventually make my own wine in small batches using the various fruits from orchards around here. We'll see how this works. The guy who is "mentoring" me has over 30 years experience and graduated from Yale culinary so, I'm hoping to gleam something from the guy.

Good luck with that. I used to brew my own beer but it seems like it would be really hard to make a decent wine. Most wineries don't even seem capable of it.

ditto

Fixed.

Thread reminds me of when, on my honeymoon in Southern Italy, the wife and I pulled over and bought some homemade wine from some old guy on the side of the road.
Most disgusting shit I have ever tried. Just awful.

There's not a whole lot of positive energy in this thread, huh?

go wine!

seriously, though, hope it goes better than everyone else's apparent experiences, but at least it'll be something interesting and i'm sure you'll get something out of it. i'd do it.

I didn't mean to completely piss in the punch bowl. I am sure you will learn interesting things through the process and I do wish you good luck. 25-30 bottles is a lot of wine though and I'd be afraid that it wouldn't turn out that good. If it's drinkable and doesn't give you a terrible hangover, you are doing better than a lot of the big vineyards. There's just a much greater disparity between good wine and bad wine, and it seems to me to be a lot harder than beer making. There are a lot of bad brewers out there too I suppose but I don't think most of them are aiming high and failing like in the wine world.

I took viticulture in college since my school (UC Davis) is one of the few in the country to have such a program. I don't remember much of any of the details but yeah, not a simple process. As long as you're just doing it to have fun though...

Nah, I don't mean it to sound like I'm depressed about the comments or disheartened. Its just something I think will be fun, and heck if I can hand out some bottles and laugh at the quality, all the better.