Different Wines for Different Kinds

Behold, the power of SCIENCE!

My business is consumer winemaking products, and Global Vintner's, the umbrella company that Winexpert is part of, is the largest manufacturer of consumer winemaking products in the world. Our normal modus operandi is to provide an equipment kit and a Bag-in-Box 'kit' of blended and balanced juices and concentrates sufficient to make thirty bottles of wine. It only takes a few square feet of space, less than three hours of work and less than eight weeks of waiting to make some pretty darn good wine.

Normally, the only alternative people making their own wines at home think of is whole winemaking grapes. It's a big market as well, but unless you live near a productive vineyard area or on a straight trucking path from one, they can be difficult to access, not to mention the fun and games of processing an primary agricultural product. (Don't get me wrong, I love grape winemaking, just don't have the space and time these days). It's pretty much a year or longer to get the wine in the bottle as well.

But there are other ways, some don't take as long as grapes or even kits and some have a much smaller footprint as well.

Hasn't aged a day

Way back in prehistory when I worked in homebrew retail (it was so long ago that it was before we called it 'consumer winemaking') we used to sell a product called, 'Wonder Wine'. I checked, and it's still around. It's pretty much the Kool-Ade of winemaking, with packages of flavour crystals, yeast, nutrient and clarifiers. You add it to a gallon of water and ten pounds of sugar and in a week you'll be drinking your alcohol-containing wine beverage.

Quality? Well, the people who bought it from me never, ever complained about the the quality or flavour of the wine. At a buck a gallon, I don't think anyone was motivated by a quest for ultimate quality, but it did make a beverage and people came back for more.I was thinking about Wonder Wine the other day when someone sent me a link to a new product, 'Spike Your Juice'. Even simpler than Wonder Wine, it's a single packet of additives and an airlock.

Mighty slim equipment list

You purchase a two-litre (64 ounce) jug of ready-to-drink juice, discard the cap, drop in the packet of secret ingredients (yeast), pop on the airlock and wait a couple of days, and you've got drinkable beverage. Sounds simple, but also suspiciously like both balloon wine and Pruno.

 

Yes, but can it float a house to Paradise Falls?

I first read about Balloon Wine in the Whole Earth Catalogue, as a seven year-old proto-Hippie (I got better). The deal was to take a gallon of Welch's grape juice, add a pound of sugar, drop in a teaspoon of bread yeast, put it in a warm place, and squeeze a balloon on the neck of the bottle as an airlock. Balloon at the time was a euphemism for 'prophylactic', and whether or not the beverage turned out, hilarity would ensue. Only someone whose tastebuds were ruined by macrobiotic granola and the demon weed could have enjoyed the stuff, latex or no.

 

The sommellier had seen better days

Pruno? Ha ha ha, I first heard about this from a novel that included a section on prison life. Jailhouse hooch, as it were, made inside a garbage bag from clandestine fruit and sugar, yeast sourced from mouldy bread and flavour provided by sweat-socks. Lest you think I'm kidding, Steve, of The Sneeze blog gave it a full try-out. To quote him, "Forget about drinking it, I was afraid of getting it on me."

Aside from these more marginal winemaking efforts, there are actually superior alternatives for small-footprint winemaking. A new one in Canada (it's been available in the USA for some time) is Artful Winemaker (full disclosure: it's a GVI product, although not one of mine).

That is some high-tech looking winemaker

Because it's made from winery-grade concentrates and juices, the finished wine experience is a lot more wine-like and a whole lot less cheap-homemade-booze-like than any of the things described above, and it's a wee bit more advanced, technology and technique-wise than any of the others as well. Yielding a dozen bottles, it's well-suited for folks who don't have the room to make and story 30 bottles of wine at once. It's not much bigger than a stand-mixer, so it can sit in the kitchen while it works. I tried one out, and was able to make an entire batch in my office without trouble (why, what do you do in your office--work?) My only issue is that a dozen bottles of wine isn't going to last me very long, but I'm definitely not the target market for this product.

I read an interesting quote about technology once, attributed to John Varley. He said that the future is here right now, it's just not evenly distributed. When I see people making balloon wine and Wonder Wine, and others taking advantage of systems like Artful Winemaker, it's abundantly clear that it applies to winemaking technology as well.

Posted by Differentim AT 2:53PM 0 Comments Comments Post A Comment Post A Comment Email Email

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