My father-in-law makes and gives away enough that he's probably violating a few laws about liquor distribution.
He's from Eastern Europe and everyone he knew made wine. It's amazing how interesting his wine tastes compared to the bottled variety. No sulfites, no ingredients other than grapes.
It tastes best about 9 months after it was created and goes south after about a year. The craziest thing, though, is that at about month 12 it starts to sparkle a little. Nothing serious like Champaign, but a bit of tingle on the tongue (and it hits you a little quicker imo).
There's only a few downsides:
1) Fruit flies. Oh man. It's bad. When I assisted him last year the first stage of filtering, we poured the waste out and it looked like half of it was dirt... except the dirt was moving. He does it in his garage so for about three months there's a thin layer of flies over everything in there and enough get into the house to make it sufficiently annoying.
2) Pressing is hard work and the amount that he makes, just about every other step in the process is very tedious. Part of that is because he refuses to use anything resembling modern equipment. It's all hard labour.
3) The temptation to turn the wine into Brandy always looms. Which is a great idea and produces fantastic truly snifter worthy brandy, but also runs the risk of burning your house down.
It's worth it though. Even the labour, since in the end you have natures best pain killer as your reward.
My father-in-law makes and gives away enough that he's probably violating a few laws about liquor distribution.
He's from Eastern Europe and everyone he knew made wine. It's amazing how interesting his wine tastes compared to the bottled variety. No sulfites, no ingredients other than grapes.
It tastes best about 9 months after it was created and goes south after about a year. The craziest thing, though, is that at about month 12 it starts to sparkle a little. Nothing serious like Champaign, but a bit of tingle on the tongue (and it hits you a little quicker imo).
There's only a few downsides:
1) Fruit flies. Oh man. It's bad. When I assisted him last year the first stage of filtering, we poured the waste out and it looked like half of it was dirt... except the dirt was moving. He does it in his garage so for about three months there's a thin layer of flies over everything in there and enough get into the house to make it sufficiently annoying.
2) Pressing is hard work and the amount that he makes, just about every other step in the process is very tedious. Part of that is because he refuses to use anything resembling modern equipment. It's all hard labour.
3) The temptation to turn the wine into Brandy always looms. Which is a great idea and produces fantastic truly snifter worthy brandy, but also runs the risk of burning your house down.
It's worth it though. Even the labour, since in the end you have natures best pain killer as your reward.