4 Reasons Why I Make Wine at Home
I am a winemaker. While I don’t own a fancy vineyard (someday I will) and I don’t grow my own grapes, I have been making my own wine for years. So, how am I a winemaker? I make wine at home.
Since 2011, my husband and I have been making wine out of our kitchen. While we will still buy our favorite wines when visiting wineries, our winemaking hobby is not one that we will be giving up anytime soon.
Not only is it a fun process, but it also produces excellent (tasting) results!
Here are the top four reasons my husband and I make wine at home. Maybe they will even convince you to become an at-home winemaker.
Low Cost Per Bottle
While there are upfront costs to becoming a winemaker, in the long-run the cost per bottle is very low. Depending on which wine we decide to make, our average cost is less than $4 a bottle.
Less than $4 a bottle!
Yes, you can get cheap wine at some grocery stores, but is it a wine you love? I can honestly say that I love the wine we make and would select it over a lot of bottles that cost much more.
To help keep our per bottle cost low, we reuse wine bottles and don’t put on foil toppers and sticker labels unless we are giving the wine as gifts.
Easy Process
The process for making wine at home is easy and not very time-consuming.
We don’t grow the grapes – we did purchase a grapevine once but we never saw a grape. We also don’t stomp the grapes. Instead, we buy wine kits (like this one) that contain the juice and all other needed additives.
The kits come with very easy to follow directions. The entire process takes a few weeks, but there are only a few hours within that timeframe that you have to do any work. During the rest of the time, the magic works while you sit back and enjoy a previously made bottle.
Fewer Headaches
Compared to the typical wine you can buy at the store, homemade wine typical has fewer sulfites (a type of preservative). Red wines that are low in sulfites are less likely to cause headaches.
While the debate is still out there on whether it is the sulfites that cause people to get headaches after drinking red wine, I know that I never get headaches from the wine we make. Others who have drunk our wine have shared this fact with us, as well. If it’s not the sulfites, it must be something else about homemade wine that reduces the headache possibility. Whatever it is, I’ll take it!
There’s Always Wine to Drink
The last and the most important reason why my husband and I started and continue to make wine at home is that we always have wine to drink.
I love enjoying a glass of wine after a long day. With making our own wine, I never have to worry about if I have wine at home. Instead, I can just walk over to our wine rack and select a bottle.
There are times I will tell my husband that we’re running low on wine so we need to make sure we start our next batch soon. But just for fun, I’ll count the number of full wine bottle we have on hand. How many do we typically have? Around 90!
Only as a winemaker do you think you are low on wine when you have 90 full bottles available to drink!
Now that you have read my top four reasons for making wine at home, are you ready to become an at-home winemaker?
We brew our own beer and have made some sparkling wine in the past but haven’t gone all out on the winery quite yet! Love the idea though, so fun!
We haven’t done our own beer, yet, but from what I hear, making wine is an easier process. I think sometime this year we will experiment with beer, too!
Wow! I had never thought of making wine; folks I know make beer, but these are 4 good reasons to add this to the list of can-do projects. Thanks for sharing!
I have always wanted to try this one day! It’s fun to do with a group of people and make an event out of it! I used to date someone whose parents had a huge wine making operation in their basement. It seemed fun to do!