Wine Tailor Lets You Make Your Own Wine, Sort Of…

Posted on December 17, 2008

Chen Cui and Xin Wang showing off a bottle of wine they produced You don’t get to crush the grapes as Lucille Ball did on a segment of I Love Lucy, but you sort of get to produce your own wine at a place called The Wine Tailor in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., on the site of California’s oldest winery (started 1839).

The Wine Tailor is a franchise of Wine Not, which came up with the concept and the accoutrement to make all this possible.

How it works is a variation on this:

You visit The Wine Tailor (or similar franchise), taste some wines, find one you like, and decide whether you want to make a half or full batch. A half batch is about 14 bottles, a full about 29. I chose a wine called Tre Grande, which is a sort of Meritage of Cabernet, Merlot and Sangiovese. You also get to design your own labels.

The first step of the process is quick and easy. Staff members prepare a carboy filled with the must (crushed grape juice) of the wine you want to produce. You get to pour in a package of yeast and then wait for maturity to come back five or more weeks later to bottle everything.

In other words, there’s not much excitement in the wine production stage, but the bottling is way fun. I brought my wife and daughter along (pictured) to help. Actually, they did most of the work while I sampled my wine and that of others who were bottling at the same time.

First step in the bottling process is to clean out the bottles and then stick them one by one into a pump mechanism (shown left in the photo) that automatically fills the bottles from your carboy of finished wine. You then cork each bottle on a pneumatic machine, take it over to adhere labels on it, and finish things off by heating the foil top on.

Voila–you’re done. (I make it sound easy, huh?)

This scene is highly recommended for producing wines for the holidays with your name on the bottles.

Another option is to choose the wines the store has already bottled and put your own lable on them. The store will produce the labels for you. In this scenario, you can buy a small quantity, even one bottle if you like, for a gift or special occasion.

Great concept. The wines are pretty good too, but we’re not speaking Bordeaux or Burgundy here–just good stuff from around the world.

» Filed Under Food News Tags: