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General chit chat
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07-12-2012 5:40pm#1
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Im moving to brewing wine now, as well as beer, but how are the kits expensive? They seem to work out at 2euro a bottle!
Some of the good quality ones can be pricey enough, but I think you're getting what would be very expensive wine from them, so it's a trade off. We bought one of the more expensive ones for our first batch. With hindsight it would have been better to wait until I'd done a few.
The one that's turned out the best so far was a magnum one that was cheap as chips.
In general I find them a bit thin though and so does my wife. I'll be reducing the amount of water I put in with them in future.0 -
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Kenridge and Beaverdale would be top quality wine kits. You get what you pay for. The more expensive it is, the more concentrate you get. Also the better the quality of grape it comes from. For a 30 bottle kit (23 litres) aim for 10 lt conc. for a good result. The best ones will give you 16 or 17 litres of good varietal grape concentrate. Steer clear of kits that ask you to add your own sugar. Qulaity kits will either have enough sugar in the grape concentrate naturally, or will have inverted sugar already mixed in the bag. Some comes with aok chips/elderflowers and other additives and you can get great wine. Depends on the size of your wallet
And dont be a slave to the time frames in the instructions. This is just marketing, people dont want to be patient. Usually give each step more time than it says and trust your judgment when to move on to the next step.
There are great supermarket jucie recipes that work out about 70 c a bottle and ready drink in about 6 weeks. Google Wurzels Ornage wine and Fruit T-Bag wines. Wouldn't recommend them if they didn't work, really really nice, cheap, quick and easy peasy to make 0 -
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It's hard to justify it though. I got a really lovely red for 7 quid this evening!
With beer it's different, i think. You can get good quality for dirt cheap but i just think the quality might not be the same with wines.
Actually that's not true. If you go for the top of the range and get something like a Kenridge founders kit, you'll pay around 100 euro + for about 28 bottles. Quality of the wine will be around the 15/20 euro + mark, but for 4 euro a bottle. It all depends on your technique and experience at making wine but the ingredients are certainly available in kit form to make very fine wines at very cheap prices.
You can spend much less and get very nice wine, equal to or better than shop bought, and much cheaper.
I'd say the way to go is to get your technique down and practise on super market juice wines, and when confident enough invest in a good kit. That's my plan anyway I cleared that chap on boards out of all his californian conoisseur kits 1st Cab. sav. is nearly done and very promising already. Regular prices are 15 euro for 6 bottle kit and 55ish for 30 bottle kits. So it's less than 2 euro a bottle for a very nice homemade wine. 0 -
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As long as any other wine. You are using the same ingredients as commercial wine makers. Obviously the more you pay the more grape concentrate you get and the better the grape varietal they will supply. In general the grapes used to make kits would be the ones not best for them to make wine from (not substandard exactly). But something like a kenridge would be very good quality.
For bottling, the advice seems to be that 2nd hand screw top bottles are perfectly fine but not for long term storage. So 6 months to a year should be fine. More than that then you would probably need to cork them. They improve immeasurably with maturation. So 6 months in the bottle would be ideal. However they are sold for drinking within a couple of months if you choose. Trick is to build up a little cellar so you can mature your wine without feeling like you are waiting for it Hence the beauty of the supermarket juice wines and T bag wines - quick, cheap, nice. Get a good stock of these going while you wait for the good stuff to be ready.
You can get plastic reusable corks and they are fine. But regular corks are cheap as anything. You can get a decent lever corker for a tenner on the usual home brew sites.0 -
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