Uk home brewer

Hi all, I'm a new UK wine home brewer and I am curious to know if anybody has ever made a small business out of the wine they make or if they have made a healthy liveable profit making and selling their wine. If so what did they do? How they did it? And could I do it and how?
Obviously UK answers would be more helpful (if anybody from the UK uses this lol) if not all comments welcome. As I said I am new and have only started 8 1 gallon brews so far. Cheers Ric.

I can't speak for the UK (sorry), but in the US you cannot do this as any alcohol sales are highly regulated (both state and federal). You would need to set up a proper winery, be inspected, have labels approved, etc. However, there isn't anything stopping you from doing this! There is a small winery down the street from me that started out making wine in their home.

If you get to that point, it's all about distribution (the product is the easy part, finding a distributor who will support a small winery is much more difficult).

Hope that's helpful!

RickyAshdown said:

Hi all, I'm a new UK wine home brewer and I am curious to know if anybody has ever made a small business out of the wine they make or if they have made a healthy liveable profit making and selling their wine. If so what did they do? How they did it? And could I do it and how?
Obviously UK answers would be more helpful (if anybody from the UK uses this lol) if not all comments welcome. As I said I am new and have only started 8 1 gallon brews so far. Cheers Ric.

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Livable profit ... possibly yes ... if you do all the business stuff - basically the items in a standard business plan ... but for alcoholic beverage sales of course.
But merely selling it out of the back of your lorry ... not likely.

As well, grape wine generally needs to be aged, this means storage and controlled conditions. You might get away with a sangria or a spiced wine sooner. Commercial wine is not so easy to do "casually" and actually make a living from it.

Get rich? ... make a version of white cider like Diamond or Frosty Jack or White Lightening used to be. People beat a path to the merchant's door to buy the stuff.

Actually, I'd think that some form of strong cider would be a better bet all the way around than wine. But in the land where cider is deep in the history and culture, there's a real chance that most people getting into the market would be just an "also ran".
Just my 2 pence ;-)