Since this is my first blog for Winemaker Magazine, perhaps a short introduction is in order. My name is Tim Vandergrift, and I live a life soaked in wine. My day job is Technical Services Manager for Winexpert, the largest wine kit manufacturer in the world.  Before that I was the technical guy for RJ Spagnol’s, the second-largest manufacturer, and I’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years now. While the job is real enough, the title is pure malarkey.

The truth is I run a sort of anti-support group for problem winemakers. Unlike traditional support groups which encourage people to drop bad habits, change their lives and make a clean break from non-productive behaviours, I encourage people to embrace the spirit of home winemaking, to make that next kit, to build that cellar addition, to purchase that extra carboy, to serve wine with every meal (Gewürztraminer and granola is tastier than you’d think) and overall, to incorporate the gracious and delightful addition of wine into their lives. Note that I’m not encouraging people to consume more—just to consume their own.

It’s an uphill battle in some ways. While the modern wine kit (a bag of juice and concentrate shipped inside a cardboard box with yeast and processing aids) has been around since the early 1980’s, there are still many people who’ve never heard of kit wine. When they hear ‘homemade wine’ they visualise people up to their hips in vats of grape mush and cloth-capped olde worlde European types drinking cloudy purple brew out of jelly glasses topped up with 7-Up.

On the other hand, there are a lot of folks out there who make their own wine using grapes who wouldn’t be caught dead walking out of a winemaking supply shop with a kit. ‘Cheating’, they say, or ‘Can’t make good wine that way. Only grapes make good wine.’ Many of these folks fail to reconcile the fact that kit wines have won many thousands of medals in open competition with grape wines over the years. They also miss the point that kit wines are made from . . . grapes. Aside from processing aids like yeast and oak and finings, kit wines don’t contain a darned thing that doesn’t go into consumer produced grape and commercial wines every day.

But those folks aren’t my target demographic, so they don’t keep me awake at night. What does keep me awake is thinking that out there are those people who haven’t yet considered making their own wine at all. Quelle dommage! There’s one overwhelmingly great reason to make wine your self. A lot of folks might think, ‘price’, but while it might seem cool to make high-end single-vineyard wines for only three or four bucks a bottle, people who make their own wine don’t save money at all. In fact, almost all of them wind up spending more money on wine than they did before they took up the hobby.

Oh sure, they pay less per bottle, but like a lot of folks (including me), before they made their own wine they drank wine in what I call ‘North American’ style, saving it for special occasions, buying bottles shortly (in some cases only minutes) before they intended to consume them, and perhaps only keeping a few bottles on hand at a time, looking forward to the weekend or visitors.

When suddenly confronted with thirty—or sixty, or three hundred—bottles of wine in their  basement or cellar, people suddenly switch over to a more European style of consumption: wine becomes as much a condiment to food as a beverage of occasion or intoxication. They start having wine with pot roast on Wednesdays, after work on Friday instead of a Martini, and most of all, they start to share it with everybody, taking bottles to friends, opening a bottle as soon as guests drop by and making batches just to give away.

The funniest thing I get to hear in my job, repeated, over and over (and funnier every darn time I hear it) comes from new winemakers who find out that a kit makes six US gallons (23 litres). “Oh no!’ they exclaim, “I’ll never drink thirty bottles! What will I do with all that wine?”

Six weeks later they’re back at the shop, declaring, “I’m completely out of wine. I have to start another one right away!”

Music to my ears, that is.

So welcome to my support group. In upcoming blogs I’ll talk about a wide range of kit-related topics: styles, processing tips, tweaks, hints, etc. There’s nothing as delicious as a wine you make yourself, and nothing better than sharing it with other people.

Santé!