wine making on the wasatch front

Utah's liquor laws are complicated.  You can still get a drink, no worries: there are bars, and restaurants with liquor licenses; you can buy beer in grocery stores (3.2% alcohol by weight/4% alcohol by volume) and the liquor stores sell booze, wine and higher alcohol beer.  It's really not that big a deal - just be patient with the bartenders when they are explaining it to you because it's not their fault.  But if you don't want to deal with all of that, if you want to stockpile without breaking the bank or if you're looking for a six-week project, you can make your own wine at home.  If I can do it, anyone can!

Salt Lake City actually has a home-brewing supply store, The Beer Nut, located at 1200 South State Street.  It's a cozy little shop, selling beer-, wine- and soda-making kits, ingredients and equipment.  They have a pretty big selection of wine-making juice kits: the majority seem to be red wines but my dad, who has been home-brewing and home-vintnering for decades now, told me that whites are easier than reds, so I picked out a Winexpert Luna Bianca, a chardonnay blend.  We already had much of the equipment we needed because H brews homebrew from time to time (although he hasn't done it out here yet) and I borrowed the most expensive thing I didn't have, a 6-gallon glass carboy, from a work friend.

You do have to be patient when making your own beer and wine.  I started primary fermentation on June 26 ( I had been waiting until the basement temperature was a constant 70 F because fermentation requires 65-75 F), mixing up the juice, oak chips and various additives and then letting it sit.  On July 4, the specific gravity was 1.010 which meant I could decant the wine into the glass carboy for secondary fermentation.  Then I let it sit for ten days.  After that, I checked the specific gravity (which for the variety I was making would not get lower than 0.998) to check that it remained the same for two consecutive days.  Stabilizing and clearing came next on July 15, which involved stirring the yeast sediment back into the wine and adding clarifiers.  Then I let it sit for eight days to clear.

On July 23 I racked the wine - siphoning the clear liquid off of the dregs into a clean container - and then let it sit another two weeks to finish clearing.  It looked pretty good on August 7, but my dad said that at this point, I could leave it there in the carboy almost indefinitely before bottling.  That was good because we got busy with friends and summer stuff in August and it wasn't for another month that we finally got around to bottling the stuff.  I rented a corker from the Beer Nut, washed all the bottles we'd collected and soaked the natural corks.  Then H and I did the bottling, six gallons of wine into 30 bottles, with just over two wineglasses of overage.

It looks like wine, so that's a plus

The bottled wine is supposed to age for at least a month but we had to drink those two glasses: it's kind of fruity and a little sweeter than I prefer (note to self: next time buy "dry," not "off-dry") but it's absolutely drinkable and a splash of seltzer takes away most of the sweetness, turning it into a refreshing wine spritzer.  We're calling it "Cecret Chardonnay," from the nascent WeWentWest Winery - I'll put up another photo when we get the labels done.  Looking at those thirty bottles on the counter was a hoot - I don't think I've ever had so much wine in the house all at once.  With the cost of the kit, the corks, the sanitizers and the corker rental, the price per bottle comes out to about $5 - or the price of a pint of beer at the Porcupine.  I'm not saying we're giving up on going out, I'm just saying it's kind of fun to have homemade options.