Higher-end homemade wine a real surprise

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/09/2018 (2537 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Ugh. No. Not again.”

That’s what the voice inside my head said a couple of weeks ago when I was offered a glass of homemade wine by my good friend Dave Scott after a rehearsal for an upcoming gig. (He plays drums, I sing and attempt to play piano.)

But since I really like Dave and didn’t want to insult him or hurt his feelings, I put on my game face and said yes to a glass of Chardonnay.

Dave being Dave, he poured me a generous glass, and again inwardly, I sighed. I braced myself as I sniffed the wine — it smelled OK — and prepared to take the first sip.

Truth be told, I was shocked. It wasn’t bad. Not bad at all! I took another taste just to make sure the first hadn’t been a fluke, but again I was stunned. This was unlike any other homemade wine I’d ever had.

My husband, Ken, and I used to make our own wine decades ago, as did my mom. And while my mom’s was way better than ours, and her Riesling even won first place in a friendly homemade wine competition, neither ours nor hers was remotely close to Dave’s. I didn’t love it, but I sure didn’t hate it. In fact, I didn’t mind it at all.

I sipped away on the Chard and eventually finished my glass. He offered me a bottle of red to take home, and I declined, suggesting he keep it until the gig that was to take place two days later.

Sure enough, he had the bottle of red waiting — and even chilled especially for me because I like it that way — at the gig. So although my husband and I had brought our own wine with us (the fabulous William Hill North Coast Chardonnay — Californian and $19.99 at bottle), we said yes to a glass of his red.

The same scenario played out. I was polite but reluctant, then oh-so-pleasantly surprised by how tasty — and how dry — the red was.

And here’s the kicker — well, there are two kickers, actually. I had a second glass! And a then very small third. That’s how impressed I was.

As well, once the performance was over, my hubby, who’d been nursing his solitary glass of red because he was the DD, reacted the same way I had when I’d tasted Dave’s wine at the rehearsal.

“That’s homemade wine?” he asked, raising his eyebrows in amazement and giving his glass an appreciative glance, then looking at me for confirmation that what I’d said was really true.

I assured him it was indeed, and Dave’s wine dominated much of our conversation on the ride home.

When Ken and I used to make wine, the predominant smell and taste of sulphites really ruined the experience for me. Like most people, we made wine to save money because it was far less expensive than buying from the Liquor Mart. But once we started appreciating wine in earnest, there was no more homemade wine for us. We just didn’t enjoy it anymore. Plus bottling, which had started out as a fun activity we could share, had turned into a chore that we both resented. Really resented. Hated would be the most appropriate word.

And while, as I mentioned earlier, I still vastly prefer commercially produced wine, there was no question, having tasted Dave’s concoctions, that homemade wine has come a long way.

One thing I know we did wrong was buy the cheapest or next-to-cheapest kits available. And I should clarify here that while Ken made wine from all sorts of fermentable materials before I knew him, I’ve never made wine from anything other than a kit. And Dave’s overriding lesson was to invest in higher-quality kits if you want higher quality results. No surprise there, since you generally get what you pay for.

However, he told me that he takes advantage of the services offered by Wine Sense at 930 18th St., which bills itself (it’s part of a chain) as “Manitoba’s leading retailer for On-Site winemaking and winemaking supplies.” While I liked Dave’s Chardonnay, I was really intrigued by his red. That kit was Vieux Chateau Du Roi regular price $115, but purchased on sale for $91.

When I paid a visit to the store, manager Jason Chambers confirmed what Dave had told me. Wine Sense charges $49.99 to make the wine using regular corks and $54.99 if you prefer synthetic corks.

To make the process “legal,” the “winemaker” has to pour the yeast into the juice from the kit and the filtered water (rather than tap water, which we used back in the day). And Wine Sense takes care of the rest.

“They keep it in the store and give you a bottling date, usually 30 days ahead,” Dave said. “This is a huge bargain as they do the rack-off and degassing from the primary to the secondary stage, so you don’t require all the expense of equipment, to say nothing of all the work.”

Jason said Wine Sense carries kits that range in price from $52 to $180, but that the kits are sometimes on sale. And he said using their equipment makes bottling a breeze — it usually takes people half an hour per batch, whereas it used to take Ken and me three hours. Or maybe it just seemed that way.

Anyway, Wine Sense does everything but add the yeast and do the bottling, and the customer has to provide his or her own bottles. But there is still a tremendous saving to be had. On bottling day, patrons get to use Wine Sense’s power washer, bottle filler and air-pressure corker.

Dave said he usually gets 28 bottles from a kit, so it costs him $1.79 per bottle to have the folks at Wine Sense do what they do. Ultimately, his total cost for the Vieux Chateau Du Roi at the sale price was $5.50 per bottle.

I have a friend who has been urging me for years to do a column on homemade wine. I dodged the issue for a while, but finally told him frankly I felt that would be doing a disservice to my readers, since I absolutely couldn’t stand homemade wine. To his credit, he accepted that and never mentioned it again.

But after tasting what’s possible when one invests in the pricier kits and has professionals do much of the work, I won’t be as dismissive in the future. While winery-grown-and-produced wine is all I’ll ever buy, I’ll try not to be judgemental before I taste homemade wine the next time. I might not like it, but at least I’ll give it a try.

Just please pour me a very small glass to start with. If I’m enjoying it, you can bet I’ll ask for more.