THE Homemade Wine Site
Last Updated: 6th July, 2008

Make FINE WINE from home

Anyone can make frozen concentrate grape wine from home. It's easy. Take some Welch's grape concentrate, add some water and sugar, add some yeast, wait a week - and you have wine. You won't drink it and neither will your friends.

If you want to make terrific wine from home, you need to do a little more research and planning. The first thing you need is the BEST grape juice. Where do you get it? Where can you find it? How much does it cost?

You would be amazed...

You can easily have the very best juices and grapes shipped to your front door. All you need is a list of places to order them from. The best part? You can make the finest of fine wines for as little as $2 to $4 a bottle. The process is simple and easy. All you need is the step-by-step guide to do it.

Thank goodness there is a book you can buy by Alex London that has simple, step-by-step instructions. He also has a bonus that tells you exactly where to get the very best grapes and juices. This is the key to making wine from home. Get the GOOD STUFF!

You can buy Merlot, Pinot Noir, Red Zinfandel, Cabernet and other grapes direct from the vineyards and have it shipped directly to you. The price is extremely reasonable.

The best wines start with the best grapes - believe me - I know. I have tried making wine from a lot of fruits and fruit juices. The BEST wines come from the BEST grapes.

Posted by Winebuddy at 7:36 PM 0 comments Saturday, December 15, 2007 What to do with your CRAPPY wine I just finished 5 gallons of highly acidic grape wine made from concentrate. The alcohol is in the 14% range and it has a HUGE bite. Pretty much terribly acidic. What am I going to do with all of this?

Simple. Give it away! I bottled it all in 2 liter magnum bottles and I affixed a label with a skull and crossbones on it that clearly says "drink at your own risk"! I am passing it out as "bonus" Christmas presents and telling the recipients that it needs to be aged at least 3 months before they drink it. It will still taste acidic but not quite as bad as it does now.

I figure that if you keep anything for 3 months, and you wait for it to age - you will drink it. Only time will tell... Posted by Winebuddy at 4:23 PM 0 comments Apple/Grape Wine My first 3 gallon batch of apple grape wine is in it's 7th week now. I have just added some potassium sorbate to stabilize it. It was STILL fermenting at 7 weeks - unbelieveable. Now it has settled down.

My hydrometer reads right at 1.00 but it started a little above 1.1 so the alcohol content should be about right. I sampled it yesterday and it is quite sour. It will probably need to be sweetened. I plan on using a little more apple frozen concentrate.

I put finings in last night and it is beginning to clear. This stuff appears to be very cloudy, however, with a pretty good amount of finings, it should clear in about a week. I will keep you posted!

Posted by Winebuddy at 6:59 AM 0 comments Friday, December 14, 2007 Sparkling Wine and Champagne Ahhh the Tiny Bubbles! Sparkling wines and champagnes typical make their appearance during the holiday season every year. We make champagne cocktails many time and other times we just mix the bubbly with orange juice (a mimosa).

You can have a virtually unlimited supply of the bubbly if you decide to make your own. Here is a site that details how to do it: http://www.how-to-make-wine.net/. While this is not the focus of the site, the book on how to make sparkling wines and champagnes is an added bonus.

It is highly recommended. It also deatils how to make your own wine. If you are just a budding winemaker, or an old pro, these books are an excellent resource. Posted by Winebuddy at 1:38 PM 0 comments Thursday, December 13, 2007 Homemade Wine Book A new book has just been released that details how to make fine, delicious homemade wine. Not rotgut, jug wine, but excellent, full bodied wines that can win contests. The Complete Illustrated Guide to Homemade Wine has just been made availabe and not only does it describe the intracacies of fine wine making from home, but also comes with 7 valuable bonuses. The book details the 7 deadly sins of winemaking and how to stop them dead in their tracks. It also details additives that will make your wine taste better.

The bonuses include a couple of hard to find wine recipes and one in particular that I like, "Fresh Grapes for Fine Wines". This nice little bonus selection contains sources for the "real thing" grapes and juices - like Pinot Noir grapes, Zinfandel grapes and juices, and Merlot grapes. As the author states, the best wine comes from the best grapes.

All in all, this collection is a must have if you are going to brew your own wine at home. The highlight is that anyone, with the right techniques and ingredients, can make fine, full bodied wines for as little as a dollar a bottle. It's a MUST read. Making Homemade Wine is proven to lower your cost, Increase your wine enjoyment - and help the environment. Vineyard quality wines can easily be made with the correct instructions

But, up until recently, it was also pretty expensive - the only way to make GOOD, Quality wines was to use professional equipment, which could cost as much as $2,000. Even stand-alone winemaking kits can sell for as much as $500.

Luckily, the last six months has seen a crop of Home winemaking kits and guides, which show exaclty how to make homemade wine yourself - using low cost materials, and with little or no technical knowledge required.

We decided to sit down and review these new guides - our key criteria were ease-of-use, affordability of materials, and speed of setup.

Overall, we were pleasantly suprised with the results - the guides evidently do work, and if you pick the right guide, you could well be up and fermenting your own homemade wine in a few hours.

We reviewed 11 wine making guides - only 3 met our criteria:

  • Sizeable Money Savings - make quality wine for $1/bottle or less
  • Fast and Easy Setup - in only a few hours, even for novices
  • Affordable Set-Up Cost (well under $100)
Our Choice : The Complete Illustrated Guide to Homemade Wine

Rating
9.8/10

Ease of Use
Money Savings
Customer Support
Environment Benefits

"Still the best Home Winemaking Guide in 2008..."

By far the easiest-to-follow guide we came across - our own experience says you should set aside maybe half a day to buy the parts and get fully setup.

This is the only guide that assumes absolutely no knowledge of winemaking. Impressively, our email question was responded to in under an hour (although it could take a little longer on weekends), and there is an unconditional 8 week guarantee.

Best of all, the equipment required is readily available and cheap - we were able to get access to all the things needed for well under $50. Given that its proven to decrease your cost of wine by almost 90%, you could well recoup your investment in under a week.

Making homemade wine works with any type of fruit, grapes, flowers, or vegatables. Aimed squarely at wine "novices", and still our top pick for 2008.

May 2008 Update : there is now a promotion running on the site, and it is temporarily available for $29 instead of $97 - as such, we recommend ordering sooner rather than later.

The Verdict: Fast and easy setup; works for complete wine novices; proven cost savings of up to 90% - our top pick

Rating 9.0/10

Ease of Use
Money Savings
Customer Support
Environment Benefits

Highly Recommended

2. All Winemaking

Our second pick uses the same information as our top pick - and again, we were impressed by the fast support, money-back guarantee and low setup costs.

The guide includes six bonuses (one of which is lifetime access to the home winemakers newsletter and evena kit decapper, arguably worth the cost of the guide on their own).

All in all, its a great package which means you can be enjoying massive savings for very little, very quickly. So why only four stars?

Well, perhaps we were spoiled by our top pick, but we found the price a little higher - and since cosgt is so important, we decided to knock off a star.

Rating 7.0/10

Ease of Use
Money Savings
Customer Support
Environment Benefits

Also Recommended

3. Guide to Home Brewing

The Guide to Home Brewing is our third and final pick, and it actually includes 3 separate courses to help you create your own Homemade wine, beer and other ales.

They report upto 95% savings over store-bought - and again, the guide was presented in a clear and easy-to-follow format.

The difference between this and the other two sites was simple, however - my support ticket was not responded to. A full, hands-on support system is vital if a relative "wine novice" is to set up the equipment, and here unfortunately it just wasn't there.

Where from here? We recommend The Complete Illustrated Guide to Homemade Wine:
<< Click here >>

Main Page | Wine Equipment | Blog | Winemaking Book

© 2005-2008 Homemade Wine Reviews, with all rights reserved