Does homemade wine actually taste good?

I'm a big wine guy, and I am curious about trying to make it, but I have to ask- does the homemade stuff actually taste comparably good to a good wine that you'd buy in the bottle?

Sorry if it seems like I'm trolling here but after all the threads involving welch's grape juice, it kinda sounds like taste might not be the biggest reason to make your own, but more for the experience (which is fun too, but not exactly the same).

Go buy some juice from a local wine shop, I don't understand the Welch's grape thing, we buy 2.5 tons of grapes a year and our wine is awesome. But I also have a mentor who has been making wine for 30 yrs.
I recently took a bottle of my Syrah to my brew club meeting, and the one kid took a sip and said it was good then after he was really excited and was convinced I did not make it. He was a wine guy and really thought the wine fit the style perfectly. It's a great hobby.

Like most things in brewing the quality of ingredients and your technique is going to determine whether you make crap or not. I haven't tried the Welch's juice wine so I don't know how that tastes but I do know that you can make good (even award winning) wine at home.

I bought a reasonably priced wine kit. I thought I did a good job fermenting it. The taste wasn't as good as I expected. It makes a great pasta sauce though.

My meads are nice but not terrific.

My ciders are enjoyable.

But by far, my beers are the best thing I make.

Maybe I understand beer better. Maybe I care more about beer. Maybe beer is more forgiving.

Wine and mead making is a hobby. Like all hobbies involving skill and talent, the more serious you are and the more you practice, the better you become. I like to cook but my food will never taste as good as Jamie Oliver, Bobby Flay, or Emeril Lagasse. My mead and some of my wines, on the other hand, are as good as any similar commercial selections I've tasted. Will your first wine be that good? Probably not, but with practice it can.

If you are going to make a kit, I will say that the more expensive wine kits, do make better wine. Try one with a minimum of 16L of juice.

I make some quick "ok" wines, like the Welch's.

I make fantastic oaked country wines, some of which are great after 4-5 years. Some of my wines are truly excellent.

I have made some good kit wines, some of which are similar to a $25 bottle of wine.

As the others said, you won't win any awards with Welch's. But it's an easy drinking cheap wine that takes only a short time to make. There is usually a wine for everyone, from cheap to expensive, just like commerical wines.

Not sure if they do this in Texas, but you can probably find a place. Northern Ohio is a pretty big wine area. Just after the harvest every season, the local homebrew shop trucks in a ton of pressed juice. You can go and buy however many gallons of whatever varietals they are offering. I'm sure its quality stuff. I'm assuming people come and get their juice once a year and have constantly rotating yearly batches. If you can find a place that does this, I think it would be your best bet for getting quality juice to make good wine.

Ed, you talking about JW Dover by any chance?

looking at the empty wine box my LHBS used to put my grains in i noticed the ingredients were "grape juice from concentrate" and some other stuff... i try to never use juice from concentrate for either drinking or cider making, it has a far inferior flavour. but how does a quality grape juice compare to freshly squeezed vinyard grapejuice?

I hate saying things like this here... but in my honest experience, no. Homemade wine is not nearly as good as commercially produced good wines. While I agree it is a hobby and you can get better at it, in a product such as wine wherein the final product depends so heavily on the raw material, a kit will never live up to a finely crafted wine.

If you have access to high quality grapes, then the sky is literally the limit. I live in Wisconsin. How great do you think the grapes I have access to are?

That said, my family tends two separate vineyards growing 8 different northern hardy varieties. We are in our 6th year of tending and finished our third vintage this past season. I think we will be able to produce a high quality product out of those vines, but it will not be comparable to California or other classic wines. It will be its own thing. I think we will be closer to a Rhine wine with high acidity and a bright crisp, low alcohol wine. Also, one of the reds has a chance of developing into something good, but it is not like anything else I have had.

Overall, do it for fun not because you can be the next great thing. My brother loves wine but isn't all that into tasting it. On normal week nights or whatever, he just wants some wine to drink. Kits are perfect for him because he actually saves money and has wine to drink that was fun to make.

There are a million facets to the hobby. I just don't want people going in with unreal expectations.

Steelers77 said:

Go buy some juice from a local wine shop, I don't understand the Welch's grape thing, we buy 2.5 tons of grapes a year and our wine is awesome. But I also have a mentor who has been making wine for 30 yrs.
I recently took a bottle of my Syrah to my brew club meeting, and the one kid took a sip and said it was good then after he was really excited and was convinced I did not make it. He was a wine guy and really thought the wine fit the style perfectly. It's a great hobby.

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In my case the Welch's thing was more an experiment than anything, if I happen to get some halfway decent wine out of it, then all the better. If not I'm sure mixing it 50/50 with some Sprite will cover up any imperfections

For years I was active in amateur radio, and I am struck by the similarities between it and homebrewing/winemaking as hobbies. There are hams who will spare no expense to create a station that is the equal or better of any commercial broadcast operation. There are others who are content with very basic equipment and just enjoy participating in the hobby. Reading on HBT I see some outstanding craft brewers and winemakers who can produce a product that can stand next to anything available commercially, while others make very nice, drinkable, but very basic beverages. To me the whole point of a hobby is to enjoy oneself and the final result, whether that is an award-winning shiraz or just a basic extract beer or a gallon of Welch's wine. I think what's great about this hobby is you can accomplish either one if that's what you want to do.

I make Welch's wine for cooking/marinating meat. 50 cents a bottle is hard to beat.

for drinking (while the welches is pretty decent) I make the kit wines where the juice is made for fermenting, and at $3 for a bottle of chianti or chardonnay it cannot be beat. easily comparable to a $10 bottle of commercial wine. 66% savings is worth it to me, not to mention the fun of doing it.

There's some groups around this part that get together for grape buys from local wineyards, and vineyards in California. They truly can and do produce absolutely excellent wine.

They buy the grapes whole and crush them themselves. Since this is what most commercial wineries do, these people makes wines every bit as good as commercial. I have a post on here about this place I went to in TX that had like 60 better bottles all fermenting away; a full scale commercial winery operating at a 6 gallon scale. They buy all their grapes, smash them and make tons of small batches, and the wines were freakin' excellent.

I have a $70 Chilean Malbec kit going right now that I don't expect to be good. But it will probably be better than the $3-$5 stuff (or so I hope). If I like the process, etc, when the locals do their next wine press, I might go get some of their freshly pressed stuff and try it out.

Basically, with kits I think that you can reach up into the $20/bottle range, maybe higher if it's a good kit, and you're really good. To go above that, or to match the truly great $20 bottles, then I think that you're going to have to get freshly crushed grapes locally somehow. Or at least that's the story that I get from some of the local home winemakers.

My meads, blueberry, banana, and kiwi wines have all turned out amazing. But that's kind of different that welches or using grapes lol

I haven't tasted my own wine yet, but I just tried a glass (or a bottle) of my uncle-in-law's Wild Berry Shiraz from 2004 - it was FAR superior to any commercial Shiraz I have ever had (and that's my favorite wine!!) - his only problem was he had sediment at the bottom.

The problem with homemade wine, IMO, is no one ever lets it age long enough. I'm holding my bottles for AT LEAST 6 months and hopefully longer! Fortunately, my finace's aunts and uncles all make homemade wine - one set churns out their wine so quickly and the othe set lets theirs age. We decided to let his aunt and uncle's supply the family with homemade wine, while we will hold on to ours for a bit.

I have some 2007 blackberry wine picked from local bushes. It's excellent. Very very excellent. No, I'm not sharing.

EvilTOJ said:

I No, I'm not sharing.

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Hey, would you mind....O'h never mind.

the professional kits aren't bad, such as those from RJ Spagnols, but they are formulated to appeal to a certain market, and don't always have the same concentration of flavours and aromas and body of regular wine. I tried to evaluate them using The Pocket Sommelier, but they tend to be weak. Good for cooking with, though.

Myself being a complete beginner, I can agree that we drank our first kit way too early.
A pinot grigio that should age 3 - 6 mos. At 3 mos I only had 1 bottle left and it was just beginning to taste like wine. I think good, high end kits are a great way to get your feet wet. The lesson I learned from batch no. 1 is don't top up with water and be patient! This is a great hobby and an excellent forum to help folks get better at it!

Make out of it what you will.

I am lucky to be in a grape growing area and can enjoy grapes picked only hours before we crush and de-stem them. Grapes like concord, niagra, diamond, etc. make nice wine. We also press thousands of pounds of Washington and California grapes each year. They also make fine wine and we have won several gold and silver medals from the American Wine Society with them. I enjoy them both.

I have noticed that many people who don't like wine will drink several glasses of concord/niagra blend and ask for more. Some years the empty bottle costs me more than the wine in the bottle. I take great pleasure in watching their faces light up when they take that first, curious sip.

What do I enjoy most about making wine? Experimenting and sharing my results.

dogboysdad said:

I take great pleasure in watching their faces light up when they take that first, curious sip.

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hahaha that goes for beer and wine, about half of my excitement when a new batch is worth trying is to see what my friends think

earthboundagain said:

it is hard for me to catch him with some free time

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Try to engage him by email and ask him (in his free time) to email you some recipes, pieces of advise, tips/tricks that you can share with others so that the knowledge lives and grows. Tell him it's nothing pressing, take his time. Just when ever he gets a chance.
(Stuff like that stirs people. Mostly because they know it to be true.)

Or you can try to swing a "Hey lets write a book".

I know my beers much better than I know my wines. Maybe that's why it seems to me like I come closer to making good wine than good beer. I use 6 gallon buckets of wine grape juice when I try to make wine that's similar to commercial wine. Aging is also very important. Patience and quality ingredients go a long way in wine making. A couple of years ago I made a batch of dandelion wine. I almost gave up on it because it just wouldn't clarify. After it was done with the initial fermentation I racked it two more times over the course of several months before it finally cleared up. I plan on saving at least one bottle of it for my daughter's 21st. She was just born a few weeks ago. I had a couple of glasses worth leftover after bottling. If it's any indication of what it will be like after a few years on the shelf then it could shape up to be an amazing wine.

I grew up near dogboysdad, and can attest to the fact that homemade wine is great. My father used to press a ton of concord grapes every year, and so did one of my uncles.

Often time Uncle George would just press the juice, pump it into a barrel and just put an airlock on it. Not add a dog gone thing to it.

Welch's grape juice is nothing like the juice you get from freshly pressed grapes. It's reconstituted from grape juice concentrate.