In the beginning...

I will admit that to many it seems crazy, but for years I have dreamt of starting a winery. I believe this to be a bold dream for someone who is only 21 years of age. Also, I am not really sure what has inspired this dream, other than curiosity and a desire to understand things that I have never done.

I hope to use this blog to explain my processes, ideas, and struggles. I also plan to start from the beginning and explain what I have already done, then to keep the blog up to date. So here we go...

In the beginning, there was only a dream, a dark basement workshop, and a small amount of money. You know the dream already. The basement workshop had long been vacant, and transformed into storage. But there was a sturdy workbench in the corner that seemed like a great place to put the wine rack and all the necessary equipment.

I needed to understand how the whole wine making process worked. I started by talking to my grandfather, who had dabbled in making wine several times. His approach was very simple, take some fruit, crush it to get the juice, add sugar, add yeast, and add more sugar to adjust the alcohol and sweetness levels as you go. Seemed simple enough, seemed cheap too!

Just to get a second opinion I googled wine making. I spent hours reading everything that I could, and learned a lot about wine, but most of what I learned made the assumption that I had a lot of fancy equipment. So I figured that I would just opt to make wine Grandpa’s way.

So on June 1^st, 2009, I picked eight pounds of strawberries, cleaned, de-stemmed, crushed, and placed them in an old crock. I then took that crock and put it in the basement, and pitched some wine making yeast that I had purchased.

Despite fighting the fruit flies for a week, the process seemed to go well. It was not until several weeks later that white spindle-like growths developed in the wine, and I began to fear that it had spoiled. This was followed by the smell of vinegar. I soon learned that the wine making yeast competed with the natural yeast and most like killed off the wine yeast. The bad yeast fermented the sugars into alcohol, the turned the alcohol into vinegar.

In the end, the wine was no good, but I did learn lessons that I will explain in a later post.