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’.