Rose tinted recepticles

Ok so wine will be my first brewers blog.

It may help to know my wine credentials however before we start.  I have liked red wine for about twenty years now.  So your maybe thinking that in that time I've become a bit of a connoisseur.  Well not really although I have tried some truly gorgeous wines.  Like most people my wine shopping habits started out based on price rather than any real taste or quality.  I liked a good £3.99 vintage whilst anything above £5.99 seemed to be strictly the reserve of gifts for people who knew their wines.  The problem is that I've never really changed.

I don't know about the the rest of the world but wine is something that has effectively got cheaper as I have aged rather than dearer.  When I was trying to impress a girl in my teens and early twenties it seemed to cost about £4 or £5 pound for the cheap stuff where now it can be as little as £3.  What's more when I was a lad the cheap stuff was truly cheap and a bit nasty.  Now supermarkets here promote some pretty strong brands with a price point under £5.  When I was young Paul Massons Californian was a wine from a far fetched region and le Piat Dor was for those who couldn't stretch to french wine.  Nowadays there's wines that I can't afford coming from south America and Australia.  At one time a screw top wine bottle was just beyond the pale where now it's the norm. 

The upshot of all this is that I've actually managed to develop a taste for wine and different grape varieties without ever having had to stretch the budget.  The problem is, as readers of this blog will know, that the budget as far as wine is concerned disappeared about two years ago.

Imagine just how thrilling it would be then to make wine at about 75pence per bottle.  How rough must that taste?  Well surprisingly I've discovered at least one wine kit (maybe beginners luck) that produces a wine that I would seek out in the shops that costs precisely that.

After a show about cooking that involved an alcoholic version of ginger beer (I tried it, it tasted great and contained almost no alcohol) I told my wife that I would like to try home brewing.  Try as I might and work hard as I do we just can't seem to afford the luxury of beer or wine with any regularity and it annoys me.  I don't want lots (well actually I do) but I used to have a couple of beers in the pub on the way home of a night and then maybe two or three cans.  By the end of 2007 I was celebrating if I could have two or three cans a weekend.  I miss beer and wine.

My wife obviously also misses beer and wine as she come home one night from the supermarket quite excited to tell me about a kit she'd seen that promised 30 bottles of wine for about £70.  £70 would buy a kit with everything needed including the ingredients and, even more exciting, once you bought the kit you could make wine even cheaper in future by just buying the ingredients.  The idea seemed good.  I liked it but I had reservations.  £70 was a damn good amount of both wine and lager made by experts and drinkable today at supermarket prices.  Also I reasoned that, easy or difficult, the wine would have to sit for months before we could drink it or we'd end up ill.  Well actually this stuff claimed to be ready in seven days.  I looked at reviews and they seemed average.  Believe it or not I saw this as a plus because I would have thought that the reviews would have said it was appalling.  There's a home brew shop close to us so I suggested we look and see what they had.  I expected again to be told to avoid the seven day stuff and go for something decent that would take months to brew but no!  Apparently there's even five day stuff that tastes quite good.  Still £70 is a lot of money.

I started to research this and couldn't find much bad about it.  People kept saying it was simple but used terms like gravity, mash, krausen and fermentors.  Well maybe it is easy but I wasn't a million percent convinced.  Thirty bottles though....That's a lot of wine and, from what I read, beer wasn't that much more difficult.  Could it be true?  Could you actually make palatable stuff at home?  I had doubts but decided to give it a try.

I think the money came more out of desperation rather than us being able to afford it but I researched the kit I needed and bought it from Tesco's (a major supermarket chain in the UK) for about £30 rather than just buying a ready made kit.  I bought a Young's, seven day, thirty bottle kit of Cabernet sauvignon.  I followed the instructions to the letter and......

A passable wine.  Thirty bottles of a slightly Rose looking red from a kit that cost about £22.  What's more it wasn't evil.  It wasn't a wine I'd rush to buy again but it was actually quite tasty.  Also now that we had the kit it would be criminal not to use it.  I was off to the brew shop for some Shiraz.  With my £30 I couldn't afford the £35 Shiraz they had so I took a gamble on Solomon Grundy Medium Dry Red.  I knew the wife would be unhappy even as I handed the £22 over.  This wine kit didn't even claim to be a specific wine.  It must be awful.  But I didn't want to come home empty handed.  I boiled my water, put 4kg of sugar in the tub along with the mix and enough water to make to 22l.  Having learnt how to use I hydrometer I tested it the added yeast.  It brewed for seven days and I tested again.  To my surprise it had reached exactly the gravity that it said on the can.  I began to bottle.  I got the surprise of my life.

Lt's deal with the downside first.  I'd say that this Medium Dry Red was actually quite a sweet jammy, plummy red.  Given my £3.99 expertise I would compare it with a ruby Cabernet.  Thing is I really love ruby Cabernet and....this was a good one.  Good enough that, were it a shop bought example, I would seek it out.  What's more at 10.5% proof it was none to shabby at getting you drunk.  Even better I had thirty bottles.  I had no kit to buy for this one and that means that it cost me less than a pound per bottle.  This could represent extreme savings and extreme quantities of alcohol.  Better still I hadn't had to do anything clever.  I needed the kit: a barrel, a bubbler and stopper, a bucket, a syphon and  a hydrometer but, once bought they pretty much last forever.  For all future wine kits I just needed £22 and I could have thirty bottles.

Of course now your thinking that, like all alternative types, I was giddy at making something that anyone else would have said was rubbish.  Not so.  I've had no bad feedback and even get requests for bottles. (Of course free booze is always popular).  So go on, give it a try.  Risk a few pounds on the equipment and try Solomon Grundy Medium Dry Red.  What's more, let me know how you get on.  I've got lots more to try but, as a starter, it's turned my head.

Now of course the wine story won't finish there, there's beer and ginger beer still to discuss but, that should do you for now.  Follow this and you may not feel as poor as you used to....You'll be too drunk to care.

Hope the new years resolutions are still going well

T