If you’re really into wine, you’ve prob­a­bly thought about mak­ing it yourself.

It’s one thing to buy wine from the store, drink it and write about it.  But even­tu­ally that gets bor­ing and you think, “I won­der if I can make it just as good?  Maybe it would be fun!”

I had that thought last year.  But I couldn’t jump into it head­first because I had no idea what I was doing.  So I bought a “kit” for about $200.  I fig­ured, “There’s not much to lose if I totally screw it up.”

The kit came with a blad­der of grape juice, yeast, equip­ment and every­thing else I needed.  As long as I fol­lowed the instruc­tions, the whole process would be fool­proof and I could bot­tle and enjoy the wine in 6 weeks!

I fol­lowed the instruc­tions, man­aged not to screw any­thing up, and my wine turned out okay.  But not great.  It came out lack­ing struc­ture and had an over­pow­er­ing candy banana aroma.  I thought some time in the bot­tle would help mel­low it out, but it didn’t.

On the bright side, I learned a lot and decided my first attempt was suc­cess­ful enough to use real fruit and make even more wine next time.

Well “next time” is finally here, and this post is the first of sev­eral to track my progress mak­ing wine again.  This week­end, I got my hands on 100 pounds of Caber­net Sauvi­gnon from the Red Hills AVA (just north of Napa, CA).

Day 1:

My friends at SF Brew­craft saved me a lot of time and mess let­ting me use their crusher-destemmer.  I did my best to pick out any jacks (small pieces of stems), leaves or any­thing else that made it through.  No veg­e­tal or off fla­vors in my wine, please!

In order to ster­il­ize the must and make sure no native yeasts were going to start fer­men­ta­tion, I added some sul­fite solu­tion and hur­ried my pre­cious cargo home.

Now this is prob­a­bly where I diverge from the aver­age home wine­maker, but I’m going to just let the must sit for three days.  While I’m per­fectly aware cold soak­ing is typ­i­cally only used in the pro­duc­tion of Pinot Noir, I’m fas­ci­nated by the pos­si­bil­ity of get­ting more won­der­ful fla­vor com­pounds out of the skins in a water-based solu­tion before fermentation.

I’m keep­ing the must cold (and as ster­ile as pos­si­ble) by stuff­ing frozen water bot­tles into the must every few hours.  I’m also keep­ing air out of it by keep­ing the must cov­ered in cling wrap.  There’s a small chance some unwanted bac­te­ria could grow in the must, but I hope the move pays off with more sub­tle, deli­cious fla­vor com­pounds in the fin­ished wine.

There’s some­thing exhil­a­rat­ing about envi­sion­ing the kind of wine you want to make, and tak­ing con­trol over every aspect of the process to make it that way.  And why not take a chance?  Every tweaked vari­able in the process is a learn­ing oppor­tu­nity, whether it works out or not.

Check out part two of Adven­tures in Home Wine­mak­ing, where I adjust the must, pre­pare the yeast and kick off the fermentation!

Related Posts:

• Adven­tures in Home Wine­mak­ing: Adjust­ments, Yeast and Fermentation
• Adven­tures in Home Wine­mak­ing: Press­ing the Wine
• Adven­tures in Home Wine­mak­ing: Fer­men­ta­tion and Punch­ing Down
• Chap­pel­let 2009 Napa Caber­net Sauvignon
• Fran­cis­can 2005 Sty­lus Napa Val­ley Caber­net Sauvignon