Now that the fall winegrape season is upon us, it’s time to discuss the Fall programs that wine kit companies launch every year. All of the major manufacturers have some sort of specialty kit they offer once per year: Project Cellar, Restricted Quantity, Limited Edition, etc.
 
The gist of these programs is an offering of a wine outside of the regular line-up of products the company offers. Sometimes it’s a rare grape, sometimes it’s from a growing region that has limited exposure to the consumer winemaking market, and sometimes it’s just a case of us getting our hands on awesomely cool grapes.
 
The program, as it usually goes, has the company sourcing a limited supply of these desirable grapes, once per year. They trial, test and work with them, and if they produce the kind of top-notch product necessary to the program, they’re in. The kits are often pre-sold, with a waiting list—demand always exceeds supply—and the announcements are closely guarded and the varieties kept secret until go-time. The kits are released post-harvest, often in the beginning of the new year, and usually at the rate of one or two per month until springtime.
 
It’s an offshoot of the harvest season and has some interesting interlocking benefits. It’s a way for winemakers using kits to participate in a calendar-mediated harvest (often because of blending kit vintages can be a bit blurry or overlapped) and to source grapes from potentially unusual viticultural areas—Alsace, Canada, Tasmania, etc. Try that as a grape winemaker living in North America!
 
Also, wacky grapes get in on the program. Things like Symphony, Tannat, Grillo and other bizarre and unheard-of grapes get their trial in these limited programs. Sometimes they graduate into the regular line-up, and sometimes consumer acceptance is low and they sink into history. But there’s always at least one offering that’s unusual and worth taking a risk on.
 
Manufacturers, of course, get to sell kits and consumers get to try something keen and exciting. But more than that, there’s a quality issue that has to do with efficiency: because the kits are all produced just once per year, and they’re not inventoried (we make ‘em, we ship ‘em. After all, they’re all spoken for before their release) there is a significant cost-savings to the manufacturer. Not only do they not have to inventory kits in their portfolio for an entire year, they don’t have to inventory the raw material at all, as it comes in and goes into kits with practically no turnaround time. This allows the company to build in extremely high quality, often equal to their hyper-premium kits, at only a bit more than their regular premium products. Win-win! (or is that wine-wine?)
 
So that’s the deal in a nutshell, but there’s a few catches that you need to be aware of: first, most of these kits are higher in dissolved solids, flavour and aroma compounds, minerality and tannins than regular wine kits. This means most of them are simply not ready to drink in six months—or even a year. Some of the lighter styles and off-dry wines can be drank early on, with much enjoyment, but even these will evolve significantly over time, with even the softest and most delicate Riesling taking on complexity and minerality and structure at one, two, three and even more years in the bottle. If your intent was to make these instead of your regular, a-batch-every-three-months table wine, you’re going to be underserved by your choice.
 
Clever fellows that wine kit marketers are, they really want you to make these kits in addition to your regular wine cellar choices. While that’s a direct benefit to the companies (and thank-you very much for your business) it’s also a sneaky educational tool. A lot of folks who make wine kits have a habit of living hand-to-mouth (or is that mouth-to-bottle) with their wine production, and are chronically short of well-aged wine.
 
Lest you think this a rebuke, I’ll admit it: I have a lot of trouble hanging on to well-aged wine, particularly whites, which I seem to drink with more rapidity than someone who is an avowed ‘red’ man should. But I always hang on to my Limited Edition wines for a year before I start dipping into the whites, two or three before the reds.
 
Back when I used to enter the Winemaker Magazine wine competition (something I highly recommend doing, by the way) people wondered aloud what eeevil secret tricks I was using to get so many medals. Was I shotgunning (entering hundreds of wines to get dozens of medals)? Nope, I generally had a very high medal rate—sometimes 9 out of ten of my wines scored in the medals.
 
Was I using my incredibly proficient skills as a professional winemaker to massage the kits in unusual ways? Hah! I’m a proficient amateur winemaker, but not a truly great one: I’ve never had enough time to dedicate to it, so I leave it to the ground-in geeks like my esteemed colleagues Wes Hagen and Dan Pambianchi to be master oenologists.
 
Was I adding some secret wine kit company ingredient to the kits to make them more delicious than technically possible? Aha, the answer to this one is both yes, and no. I was using an ingredient that improved my wines far beyond the scope of similar ones entered into competitions, but it was no secret, and it’s available to everyone. It’s time.
 
I generally entered some young wines, in order to check how they evolved. Entering the same wine sequentially, year after year told me a lot about the flavour and aroma development possible with my kits. But for the most part I was entering wines three to four years old, and some as old as ten years. And it made all the difference in the world. Of course, I don’t enter the competitions any longer, due to the fact that I work for both a sponsor of the contest (Winexpert) and the people who put it on (Winemaker Magazine). But my wines still do rather well in International Competition, with my 90% hit rate intact so far. 
 
Top quality at a value price, interesting growing areas, unusual varietals and the opportunity to age wines beyond your normal patterns—whoa, I’m starting to sound like a marketing type. Let’s just say that I’m making a big old pile of them for myself, just like I do every year, and I’ll be enjoying the fruits of my labours in years to come. It’s one way I can force myself to age my wine properly!