Thursday, July 19 2007
Blogging About Wine
Ahem. Is this thing on?
Congratulations! For some reason you've stumbled upon a wine blog. If you're already making your own wine, you probably don't need to have much explained, but if you stumbled on this blog out of the blue , you're probably wondering what's the deal, and why the guy looking through the wineglass up there has such an enormous forehead.
Consumer winemaking is simultaneously a very old and very new activity. Human beings have been fermenting sugary fruits and starches to make alcohol for a very long time--practically the oldest document in the world, the 'Hymn to Ninkasi' is a recipe for a fermented date/grain beverage. However we seem to have preferred to outsource our winemaking to professionals over time, until in the 20th century in the West it became a quaint hobby practised during prohibition and later by Italian, French and Eastern European immigrants.
Enter Stan Anderson and Wine-Art. Back in the late 50's Stan started packaging concentrated grape juice in cans. He sold it with little packets of yeast, tannin, acid and clarifying agents. All you had to do was add five pounds of sugar and five gallons of water and pitch the yeast. While this constituted the modern wine kit (and credit to Stan, was pretty visionary for the day) it really wasn't very satisfactory.
Enter Doug and Ross Tocher. They had a little homebrew shop in Port Coquitlam, Canada, called 'Brew King'. They sold a lot of beermaking supplies and a little bit of winemaking accessories. Sensing that there was an opportunity the brothers purchased a flash pasteurising system and an aseptic bag filler. They blended concentrates and fresh grape juices together, balanced them for acid, pH, sugar and tannin, and filled them into sterile bags. For the first time a consumer could simply pour out a bag of juice, add water, stir and pitch yeast, and make two and a half cases of wine in about an hour.
Two decades later, Brew King has changed a bit: it's the largest premium wine kit company in the world and it's now called Winexpert, and is a division of Canada's largest winery, Andrew Peller Limited. We make enough kits that when they're all fermented and packaged it amounts to over twenty million bottles a year. But we don't package it. You, the winemaking consumer do, and from the medals we see you win in International competitions, and the feedback we get you seem to be doing a great job.
Lots more to come in the future blog posts. I'll try to keep it fresh and updated regularly, and I hope you'll comment on what you see here.
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