The first batch of wine we ever made was a beautiful (and delicious) blackberry wine. We were college students at the time and Matt was working for the summer in the forestry department of our college. He and our good friend Josh would scope out patches of fresh blackberries as they went through the college forests building and maintaining trails. I was working in the college weaving department along with another good friend, Mary Beth – the wife of Josh. On our lunch breaks Mary Beth and I hiked out to the forest and picked wild blackberries which I froze until we had enough to make a gallon of wine. We crushed the berries, added some yeast and other ingredients and set it to ferment – all the while hoping that the flamingo-in-a-blender color of the concoction wasn’t permanent. A few months later we had a gallon of flamingo-free wine that still stands as one of our all-time best batches of wine. It tasted of green forests and wild brambles sweetened with summer sunshine. It was so amazingly good because it was fresh and made from absolute scratch.
This is not a story about that kind of wine.
You can also make wine using kits. You purchase a prepackaged ingredient kit that contains a large bag of concentrated grape juice from a particular variety of wine grape and a bunch of smaller packets containing your extra ingredients. The directions have you reconstitute the juice and set it to ferment. The kits also include a lot of ingredients we normally skip – things that make the wine clearer but don’t change the flavor – all in little numbered packages so you know what order to add them in. It’s all so easy that it feels almost like cheating in comparison.
Will it make good wine? Certainly. It won’t have that extra something that comes with making it yourself from scratch but it does make a darn good glass of (very clear) wine. And since Central Illinois isn’t exactly Sonoma valley, it’s also just about the only way for us to make grape wine. We could ship in the grapes but concentrated juice is A) cheaper, B) fresher since the grapes are spared a cross-continental trip, C) easier on the planet since concentrated juice weighs less and requires less carbon to ship, and D) cheaper. So yesterday we “made” up two kits – a Gewürztraminer and a Bergamais – two of our favorite grape wines. Each kit is 5 gallons, so we should be good on wine for awhile and by the time they’re done baby will be here and I’ll be able to indulge in the occasional glass again.