You can't make good wine from bad grapes

For anyone with a first or second generation Italian neighbour you are already aware that making your own wine, like growing your own veggies, is more about family and friends than winning awards. The extreme pleasure of pulling out a cork, popping the crown seal of your own wine, or tomato sauce, is a sense of moulding destiny.

The process for making really good red wine at home is fairly simple:

get good grapes
crush
ferment
plunge the caps
press off the wine
rack
bottle

If you’re unsure try a simple ‘Harvest Wine’ first, it is a fresh wine, drunk a week or so after harvest as soon as the sugars have converted enough alcohol, a light fruity wine that is best drunk chilled.

If you are patient, the most rewarding homemade wine is an aged red. This is also an economical way to create your own good quality ‘house red’.

Wine is very forgiving and yet easily spoiled. The line between is about being careful - select good grapes and then keep everything clean.

My own first batches of homemade wine were fairly dreadful due mostly to the only offer of grapes coming from growers with some over-watered overripe obscure variety, picked in the heat of day and ferried across town in the back of a trailer so that the start to life was a sweet slightly rancid juice. The resulting wine was, well, sweet and slightly rancid. The importance of getting good grapes in the first place is summed up in the often quoted winemakers’ saying ‘you can make bad wine from good grapes but you can’t make good wine from bad grapes’.

Bury me deep in my vineyard

We went from being weekend hobby block veggie growers to 'serious grapegrowers' because of Wally Boehm.

Wally was an inspiring man in every way - he taught us as much about how to live as how to grow good vines.

In his memory, his favourite quote, which is now more or less our own:

"Bury me deep in my vineyard,
My wish is to nourish the plant which kept me in rapture while living.
Long may it garnish my sod."
Authour unknown.

We are the custodians of Wally's vineyard. He was buried in the more traditional way but we have symbolically, ceremoniously buried Wally deep in his vineyard and our Riesling (his favourite grape and the vines he planted) is always in honour of Wally.

Quote from 'Deep in my Vineyard' by E.W.Boehm, a self published book printed by Gillingham Printers and copyright to EW Boehm 1987.

Home Producer December 2008

Thank you for the inspiration from the last person that said 'I'd love to make my own wine'
The short answer 'Do it' didn't seem to satisfy you.

And so to the Blog. We wanted to share the joy and how easy it is, but understanding that it helps to have someone to ask 'what if' and we have the luxury of being surrounded by winemakers. So this is our 'winemaker next door' and while we're at it have you made your own mustard, mayonnaise and bread? More later. For now this is a diary for the home winemaker.

In starting out to write ‘how to make your own wine at home’
I kept thinking ‘why would you?’
There are so many good affordable wines in South Australia, and Australia generally. For those of us with the good fortune to live in McLaren Vale it is literally over every back fence.
And making your own is time consuming, messy, and risky ... our own initial hesitation came from the possibility of producing undrinkable muck.

So why would you? Besides the obvious question - why not? There was a really good reason -
for the love of it.

A step by step guide to the process seems a bit like a dry argument, and the only rule of winemaking is that you should never be thirsty. So for today, contemplation and I'll get around to explanation. In the meantime open a bottle of someone else's good work. Cheers.