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Author Topic: Homebrew vs homemade wine  (Read 7574 times)

Offline corkybstewart

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Re: Homebrew vs homemade wine
« Reply #30 on: January 01, 2011, 08:00:33 am »
My French inlaws are very laid back about their wine.  They normally drink it out of the same Pyrex type glasses they drink their coffee from.  I learned wine by standing around damp caves drinking from glasses taken off a bottle tree, rinsed once with water and filled repeatedly with delicious red wine.  At the end of the session you rinse your glass and put it back on the bottle tree.  I suppose once in a while somebody cleaned them properly but I never saw it.
I love good wine and really hate bad wine, just like I do with beer.  I don't review beer on sites like BA because I don't see why my opinion of a beer should matter to anybody else in this world, just like I see no value in anybody else's opinion.  Either I like a beer(or wine) or I don't and no amount of hype or people telling me I should like it will ever change my mind.  I will change my mind if I try it again later and decide I like it.
I may look into the wine kit thing some more and see if it's doable since I pretty much have everything I need to make wine, and I'm pretty patient.  Temp control over very long periods will be my biggest problem since I don't have a basement or room with consistent year round temp.
Life is wonderful in sunny White Signal New Mexico

Offline capozzoli

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Re: Homebrew vs homemade wine
« Reply #31 on: January 01, 2011, 08:17:29 am »
Some of the rules with wine bugged me back when I thought it was important. Like red wine with beef, white wine with seafood etc.

Now I dont care. I like a hearty deggo red with my Cioppino.
Beer, its whats for dinner.

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Offline corkybstewart

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Re: Homebrew vs homemade wine
« Reply #32 on: January 01, 2011, 08:47:34 am »
Since the primary wine produced in their area is red, pretty much everything we eat goes perfectly with red wine, at least on the everyday level.  Fancy multi-course 6 hour lunches call for an assortment of wines chosen for their compatibility with whatever course we're eating.  But after lunch we may sit on the porch and drink beer.
Life is wonderful in sunny White Signal New Mexico

Offline punatic

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Re: Homebrew vs homemade wine
« Reply #33 on: January 01, 2011, 12:13:30 pm »
wine and beer is little more than the urine and flatulence of a microscopic fungus in some sort of sugar water.   ;D


My son watches my brewing and meadmaking efforts and helps me wash vessles ("where are the nuclear wessles?") on ocassion.  He thinks it's hilarious, "Dad, you and Mom are drinking yeast farts and pee!  Ha, ha, ha!"
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way.


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Offline sienabrewer

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Re: Homebrew vs homemade wine
« Reply #34 on: January 10, 2011, 09:07:50 am »
I think it's really a bit hard to compare making the two.  In terms or being right out of the box process, wine is definitely easier to make.  Add juice, add water, some other stuff and let it sit.  Beer is kind of the same; add water, boil, cool, aerate, pitch yeast.  Both processes in my opinion make an "ok" product assuming they are both given an equal amount of respective attention during the fermenting process.  Malt extract beer is better than $75 box wine kit.  The real question is when you take it to the advanced level i.e. AG brewing v. crushing/pressing your own wine.  I'll leave out growing the grapes because in my opinion that's equivalent to growing and malting your own barely. 

That being said, as someone who has done both wine and beer, I believe it is far easier to make a quality beer along the commercial lines than it is wine.  The reason being, in my opinion, is that we as brewers pretty much have the same access to raw materials as the pros do.  After visiting several wineries in Sonoma and listening to them talk about the attention to detail payed to picking and crushing the grapes on a certain day, I cannot say that home wine makers have that same access.  Therefore, it really is difficult to make the same caliber of wine as comparable to beer.  And since grapes cannot be grown everywhere in the US how can one make a comparable wine.  In addition, as a wine maker you need a ton of space and need to pay very specific attention to the chemistry of your grapes and understand how to make the proper adjustment if something is wrong.  Or else you've spent all that time and effort crushing and pressing hundreds of dollars of grapes to make a year's worth of so-so wine.  As brewers, most of the time we had no idea our water chemistry was wrong until someone brought it to our attention.  All the while we were still making commercial quality beer. 

Offline nicneufeld

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Re: Homebrew vs homemade wine
« Reply #35 on: January 10, 2011, 09:41:30 am »
I'll leave out growing the grapes because in my opinion that's equivalent to growing and malting your own barely. 

True, up to a point, but that's a big difference in commercial brewing vs commercial winemaking...very few breweries are on estates that grow their own raw materials, but wineries typically do.  With wine, its more about the growing process, less about the fermenting process, and with brewing, for most home and commercial brewers, the growing process is taken as a given and we pretty much all start with the same set of available ingredients.