The Wine Kit Experiment

While my love of wine, and specifically Pinot Noir, dates back to my first trip to Burgundy in the Summer of 1998, my interest in winemaking didn’t go beyond enjoying the occasional winery tour until Christmas 2007.  That’s when Kim (wife, assistant winemaker and designer extraordinaire) suggested that my parents give me a home winemaking kit as a gift.  Now that I owned it, I couldn’t very well put in the closet and never look at it again, as my progress was bound to come up at our regular family gatherings, so I decided to go ahead and check it out. 

The kit included a 6-gallon plastic bucket, a 5-gallon plastic carboy and 2 large cans of Pinot Noir concentrate, which is basically the juice from 100 pounds of grape with the water sucked out.  The instructions went something like this:  add water, add yeast, wait a long time, bottle.  Seemed simple enough, so that is exactly what I did.  Adding the water is to replace the water that they sucked out.  When you add the yeast, it ferments in the bucket and turns the sugar in the juice into alcohol. 

Fermentation – The act of taking humans’ second favorite ingredient, and turning it into their first. 

Kim was the one who insisted that I store the carboy full of fermenting wine inside a metal bucket, just in case it leaks.  I was sure that this was a ridiculous requirement, right up until the time I heard a “drip, drip” coming from my office and saw a gallon of wine standing in the bottom of the metal bucket.  Since Kim’s idea had saved the floor in my office, not to mention the ceiling and furniture in the family room below, you can imagine how frequently that fact comes up when we’re having a friendly debate over any given topic, related or otherwise.

A couple months later, with a fourth of my wine lost to the gods of the leaky valve, we bottled the wine in the basement in 18 recycled Burgundy bottles and carefully attached a label I designed on a website for just such a purpose.  Oh, and by the way, the wine tasted like crap.  Ok, not crap exactly, just not like Pinot Noir.  It’s sweet, which suggests that the fermentation got stuck, and is actually much better as an after dinner drink then anything else.  I made it myself though, so you can bet I’ll be drinking every bottle.

Speaking of drinking, last night we busted out our last bottle from the case of Roche 2006 Carneros Pinot Noir we bought during our trip to Sonoma in March 2007.  We actually bought it as “futures” when it was still in the barrel, and received it a year later.  Good stuff.