Why You Should NOT Make Wine At Home

Let’s say we were hanging out in the backyard, drinking some fantastic Centralas Pinot Noir, and you said, “I’d like to make wine at my house. Could you teach me how?”

My first reaction would be, “That’s just the wine talking. Let me know how you feel in the morning.”

And if you called me bright and early the next day, still wanting to learn how to make wine at home, I’d still try to talk you out of it. Here's why.

1. Making wine at home won’t save you money. In fact it will cost more than buying good wine.

There are large pieces of equipment that you pretty much need to buy – a press, a corker, fermentation containers, storage containers, maybe a destemmer – plus myriad odd and ends and lots of supplies that you need to buy – like grapes (even if you grow them, there’s a cost), stoppers, bubblers, racking tubes, sulfites, bottles, and corks, at the minimum. Plus there’s your time, which has some value. Even if you keep your equipment and supplies costs to the bare minimum, I would wager that a careful accounting of the time you spend will add up to a per bottle price that will make every wine at Trader Joes seem like a bargain. 

2. Making wine at home is hard work.

It’s physical labor that includes getting up before dawn to pick hundreds of pounds of grapes, schlepping them in and out of your car, house/apartment, etc. You’ll need to heft 60 pound carboys – or even heavier barrels - filled with wine, unwieldy fermentation bins, and bulky equipment. You’ll be wet a lot of the time, and often cold. Your back will be sore. 

3. Making wine is about 80% cleaning.

Seriously, you will spend more time cleaning than any other winemaking task. You clean and sanitize equipment and areas before using, after using, and between using. It’s tedious. It’s not why you want to make wine, yet it’s an obligatory part of the process. Your hands will prune. 

Winemaking is cleaning.

4. It’s hard to make good wine at home.

If none of the above deters you, this fact may be the clincher. Making wine on a large, commercial scale affords many luxuries you don’t have as a home winemaker. Sure, you can carefully make a 5 gallon batch of wine at home with decent results, most of the time. But there are a lot of ways that your wine will be hobbled, from a quality standpoint, and may run into problems. 

The number one quality issue is that you will most likely not be able to get quality grapes. People who own high quality vineyards in prime regions have more important uses for their grapes, don’t want to waste the time and labor on your small request, and don’t want to risk damage to their vines or introduction of a damaging micro-organism by letting you scour their vineyards to pick your own.  

Oh, you’ll grow your own, you say? Well prepare for a 5 year time-table before you can taste wine from them. New vines need to grow for at least 3 years before you let grapes ripen on them, if you want strong vines that produce decent grapes. And you’ll need to tend those vines weekly with, at minimum, sulfur sprays, training, hedging, and leafing. In the winter you’ll need to prune and do dormant season spraying. 

You’ll need to invest in trellising, bird netting, a cat to patrol for rats, and a dog to patrol for raccoons and opossums, and chickens to eat the grubs in the soil that turn into grape-eating beetles. And if you are lax for a moment in any of these areas you could lose a lot of your grape crop. 

Also, how much room do you have? Enough for 15 or 20 vines? You probably won’t even end up with 5 gallons of wine from that. Unless you over-crop, which of course will likely diminish quality. 

By the way, where do you live? Anywhere outside of California, Oregon, and Washington? Well, good luck then. Multiply everything I said above times ten. 

Even if you successfully grow, or source by other means, a decent harvest of grapes, you still have all the issues of making a small batch of wine. Smaller quantities of wine are inherently exposed to more oxygen, which can lead to more issues with spoilage micro-organisms. And you won’t have the ability to hide the flaws of one batch by blending with another.

It’s nearly impossible to use a full-sized barrel at home, which is one of the reasons good commercial wine tastes the way it does. Using a small barrel has its own challenges, and no decent barrel is cheap. Adding oak cubes or chips to a carboy can be tricky and easy to overdo, plus you don’t get the micro-oxygenation and concentration of barrel storage. 

Conclusion

I have made wine at home for over ten years. Doing so is partly what drove me to start Centralas. I wanted, finally, to make some really good wine. I had made some decent wine, but never achieved the quality that I wanted. Several times I ran into issues that ruined the entire harvest. When you understand how precious a person becomes about their homemade batch of wine, you’ll realize the extent of the heartbreak at having one of those batches ruined.

When you consider these realities, the challenges and the costs, you may just want to spend your time and money at a really nice wine store splurging on some grand crus. Believe me, it will cost less and taste better than anything you can make at home. 

If none of this deters you, you are probably someone who likes to cook elaborate dinners, had a chemistry set in elementary school, had an Italian grandfather, and you are probably bad at math and tend to ignore good advice. If so, you’re like me (minus the Italian grandfather). For you, there is no hope. You’re a mentally deranged obsessive with more passion and will than common sense.

I wouldn’t wish home-winemaking on you, but since your fate is sealed by virtue of the fact that you’ve already read this entire article and are still reading I offer you this: When you make wine you will learn many things that you couldn’t otherwise know about wine. And, if you ever happen to produce a decent bottle, and manage to not drink it for long enough to allow it to age to perfection, then, when you are able to open and taste it and share it with friends, you’ll know a sense of accomplishment that is rare and, perhaps for nutjobs like us, worth all the effort. 

Adam

P.S. If you, against all better sense, decide to make your own wine I offer winemaking consultation via phone at $65/hr. I give personalized guidance based on the specific grapes and equipment you’re working with, according to the style of wine you want to make. Just use the contact form to schedule a phone call with me.

Or…

Skip the disaster that homemade wine can be. Drink Centralas wine instead.