The Canadian Craft Wine Makers Association website is called winemadesimple.ca for a reason. Making your own wine is easy! Recently the CCWA joined forces with us at the Yummy Mummy Club to run to an amazing contest. Ten lucky “winers” from the Toronto area and another ten from my old (grape) stomping ground Vancouver, will meet, mingle and make wine.
Not only is making your own wine simple, it’s budget savvy too. You can make quality wine for as little as $4.00 a bottle. You can save even more by re-using your bottles. Added bonus – this helps reduce your carbon footprint.
Last week the wine winners each visited a pre-determined U-vint retailer to initiate their batch. You can check here for retailers near you. I visited Macedo Wine Grape Juice Ltd. in Toronto to get my batch started. I gasped. There was wine as far as the eye could see.
You can make wines from a wide array of styles like Australian Shiraz, Italian Pinot Grigio or German Gewurztraminer. I chose the Shiraz.
Getting my batch started took less than fifteen minutes.
I added some warm water to a little yeast and let it sit while I pumped the grape juice into the large glass wine vat. A batch makes thirty bottles of wine by the way. Gee, that’s practically a month’s supply…if I were entertaining often I mean. Ahem.
I added the last bit of juice by hand. The picture may be a little blurry, but I swear we weren’t drinking at the time.
Then, in went the yeast and I shook it around a bit. The vat that is, though I also shook myself around in a sort of “I’m so excited and I just can hide it” kind of way. We added the stabilizers and then my wine guide told me to put a cork in it. I’m fairly certain she meant in the vat, though I was pestering her with a LOT of questions.
Now, the wine has to wait for me for 4-6 weeks. And then, we will be reunited and yes, it will feel so good. So good in fact, we’re going to have a party! All of the Toronto Wine Contest Winners will gather together to bottle and label our batches. We’ll taste each other’s vintages, compare wine stories and simply have a good time. Kind of impossible not to really…did I mention there is wine as far as the eye can see?
Then we’ll do the same thing all over again in Vancouver. I’m so excited to meet my fellow wine making mummies. I’ll be sure to take lots of photos to share with you. And I promise they won’t be blurry. Well, as least the ones taken at the beginning of the night...
Cheers!
This blog is proudly sponsored by the
Canadian Craft Wine Makers Association
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