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Making Your Own Wine in Whitby
Winemaking is an age-old art that probably started by accident, like the discovery of penicillin. Someone’s storage of grapes went “bad”, only it turned out not to be so bad after all.
The basic process is still the same. Yeast consumes sugar and converts it to carbon dioxide gas and alcohol. You can ferment anything with sugars. If you ferment carrots you’ll end up with a drink with alcohol that tastes somewhat like carrot juice. Grapes are the chosen fruit because they produce one of the most pleasing drinks that contain alcohol.
You can make wine at home, usually in your basement, starting from juice or grapes.
Crushing grapes is an art of its own, because variables like seeds, stems, and leaves, crushing pressure, and contact time with the skins, all affect the final outcome in different ways.
Fortunately, at Chateau Vezeau Wines we handle all of this. Based in Whitby, we allow you to make your own wine from scratch! You can take a deeper look into our winemaking process here.
Starting a kit takes 5 or 10 minutes and bottling is usually around a half-hour. You can even get custom labels to say “Smith Estate Wines”. Throw up a grapevine in the back yard and tell your friends about your private winery.
What Does The Winemaking Process Look Like?
When you visit our winemaking shop you’ll be working with an expert in all things wine. We work in the business because of our love of wine and enjoy sharing as much information as you’re willing to accept. So it’s a great place and way to increase your knowledge of wine. Here is where you pick the type of wine you want to make. Then in 4-8 weeks after the fermentation process, you come back to the shop for bottling!
During the half-hour bottling session, you’ll have an opportunity to taste your finished product. Which frequently brings up additional questions.
It’s something you can enjoy with others as well. Many couples come in together and have fun with the whole process. Girlfriends arrange “night outs” bottling their wine and probably sharing some afterward. Even large groups get the benefit of dividing up the steps involved in bottling and then dividing up the different varietals that each has put on: a great way to test various types.
Does “Home-Made” Wine Taste Any Good?
Many people are hesitant about trying consumer-made wine because of concerns about the quality. They may have had a good-willed neighbour, who made wine in his basement by crushing grapes or buying fresh juice, give them a bottle that they ended up pouring down the sink.
There is a scientific explanation for this: TOTAL DISSOLVED SOLIDS (TDS)! When you crush grapes, the juice that is produced is quite cloudy. That’s due to the TDS that are floating around in the liquid. Some of these TDS are removed during fermentation and clearing, but some are not. These TDS create a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are what is responsible for giving the wine its unique characteristics. On the other hand, they are also responsible for that “green” taste that young wines have. The best way to deal with these TDS are to let them age, mature, and even drop out of the wine, which produces the best and most expensive bottles in the world. This is why that wine from grapes your neighbour gave you was undrinkable (by anyone except the person who made it). The level of TDS was high enough that the wine needed to be aged for several years, not several months, just as the bottles in the stores do.
Enter the consumer-made wine kits. These kits are made from crushing grapes as well, but because they are coming from around the globe, they are concentrated prior to shipping.
There are different types of kits with varying levels of TDS and amounts of time required to ferment. This is where we come in. We help you make an educated decision on the type of wine you want to make. That tastes just as good as your store-bought counterparts.