Ontario has a bunch of make-your-own wine companies that work like wine bricks.
1. you buy 5 gallons of grape juice for ~$20 per gallon.
2. yeast is dropped into your grape juice
3. you come to the store to decant your grape juice into wine bottles and cork them up.
Since no alcohol is bought or sold, you avoid the (very high) taxes on liquor. You end up with ~28 bottles of wine for ~$4 per bottle.
It's not the greatest wine, but it's ok for sangria and cooking, and it's a good story if you hang out with people who like to talk about tax loopholes...
DIY winemaking kits can actually make some pretty decent wines if you spend a bit of time and money getting proper equipment. Not a lot - $100 will get you a really, really good setup with two glass carboys for fermenting, siphons, thief and test jar, hydrometer, corker, etc.
I've been making my own wines for years now. Occasionally I'll do a full from-scratch wine, but more often I buy a $40 kit from Midwest Supplies [0] that has all the components - grape juice concentrate, fruit essence, yeasts, kieselsol and chitosan, potassium metabisulfite as well as full detailed instructions. All you need is four gallons of distilled water. 28 days later, ~30 bottles pretty good wine! It won't win awards or anything, but it'll make a fantastic table wine and great for everyday meals.
The only downside is that you'll spend a bit of time cleaning and sterilizing things and you'll remember all the stuff you forgot from high school chemistry class. :)
I would recommend avoiding glass carboys for fermenting. They are heavy, especially when filled, difficult to clean with their narrow mouths, and quite dangerous if they shatter when you accidentally drop them. (They're easy to drop while you're cleaning them and they're wet and slippery.) There are numerous accounts on home brewing forums of trips to the emergency room because a glass carboy broke and injured someone.
PET plastic fermenters (Better Bottle, FermZilla, Fermonster, etc.) are much nicer to work with.
A fun glass carboy story. I had just finished an hour-long boil of around 5 gallons of beer wort and then poured it into my carboy. I then needed to cool it down to a safe temperature for the yeast (~70˚) as quickly as possible to prevent infection. It was the middle of a western NY winter and so I though of the obvious solution which was to set the whole thing in a snow bank. Perhaps you can see where this is going.
As soon as I set this 5-gallon glass container of near-boiling liquid in the snow bank I realized my error because of the loud, CRACK sound. I lifted it up by the neck, but only the top half came away and I was left holding a comically large broken-bottle shiv. My roommates at the time all came out to properly laugh at me and I resolved to cool my wort before putting it in the fermentation vessel from then on. And also to stick with plastic fermentation vessels!
Plastic fermenters are MUCH safer (I am one of the many who have gotten minor cuts from shattering glass carboys) but just plain terrible for fermenting in. A little scratch in the wall and your sanitizing process will miss the wild yeast that grows in the scratch making the container essentially useless for fermenting with your chosen yeast only.
Also they make widemouth glass carboys which are very easy to clean. But they shatter all the same.
If your going to avoid glass go 304 stainless (SSBrewtechs BrewBucket etc.) plus it basically lasts forever.
Using a covered plastic or wicker basket is an easy way to transport glass carboys, and should hopefully contain much of the shrapnel if you have the bad fortune to drop them.
Cleaning any bottle with a narrow neck is extra work, but you can get it done with a pipe cleaner, and it's best not to clean at an elevation or to do so in a deep basin.
These are things that come naturally after handling significant glassware for a period of time.
My preferred solution was those Culligan watercooler-style empty 5 gallon water jugs they carry at suburban Wal-Marts. Just be careful to fit some sort of pressure release. They will expand in a scary fashion otherwise.
I've always avoided wine brewing. Lots of cider ceyser and beer. What styles/varietals are ok right out of the secondary like that?
Edit: mostly interested in Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, vino verde, and maybe tempranillo. The kits seem pretty expensive. Trader joes has very tasty bottles in those styles (maybe not the CS) for $5.
Aging is optional; it will improve the wine, but there's nothing stopping you from drinking it immediately and it will probably taste pretty decent. Many wines are perfectly drinkable after secondary fermentation has finished (and you've added the metabisulfite to fully stop it unless you're making champagne and you want additional carbonation). The longer you age it and the more work you put into it, the better the end product, but that's true for most things. Many store-bought wines are less than a year old.
To me wines are actually less work to homebrew than beer. Especially if you're working from a kit, there's no need to cook anything - just dump everything in the fermenter and go. Beyond that the process is largely similar. Primary fermentation -> secondary fermentation -> bottling -> drinking. They're pretty forgiving too.
In general, whites take a bit more work to get a really good looking product than reds. For a white, I'll usually rack at least three times over about a week, and then filter it so I get a nice, amber-clear end product with no sediment. Note that this doesn't really impact the taste much, just the appearance. Reds I usually don't bother to rack more than once or maybe twice.
When I am done I usually sit my bottles upright in a cool, dark area for a few days before putting them in the wine rack on their sides.
This one [0] specifically is a family favorite. Has a nice light, somewhat fruit taste that's great for a warm summer evening. This one is best kept cool (I keep a few of my bottles that we're about to drink in a wine refrigerator.)
Not wanting to be pedantic or snobbish, but it is "vinho verde", because it is a Portuguese type of wine (I am Portuguese, and that is why I care about this :)
Sorry I knew there was an h in there somewhere but I didn't take the time to look it up. Only been there for about a week and I loved it. The seafood was fantastic and I like the weather a lot. We were mostly around Lisbon. Really like Cascais.
thankfully, here, we have Trader Joe's and their "3 buck chuck". the local Kroger store (Fred Meyer) also has $3 wine, but I think of that as "emergency wine" - the 3 buck chuck is much, much better.
I have some questions though:
1. do they teach you about sanitization and airlocks, or is it simply "toss some yeast in this bottle"
2. I'm guessing no aging? it would be awesome if they allowed you to pop some in a barrel for aging
3. (not really a question) but wow, $20/gallon is still kind of spendy!
I've done it as well with my parents, who love wine. At the shops I've been to, you buy the grape concentrate up front and they handle to process of making it up until bottling. Once the juice has fermented, you go in and they walk you through cleaning and sanitizing the bottles, filling them, corking them, and usually shrink-wrapping the tops. They provide all the supplies except the bottles themselves - customers bring their own, saved from buying wine the "normal" way.
Never seen a shop do ageing, so the wine will be noticeably "young". My parents like dryer and sharper white wines anyways (Pinot Grigio, Riesling, etc.) so it doesn't bother them. Also note that due to taxes and such, the cheapest wine you'll find commercially is C$11 a bottle, so even at C$20 / gallon you're getting a great deal if you like the resulting wines.
Personally, I quite like the wines my folks get through these shops - properly chilled they make a wonderfully refreshing beverage in the summer, and we'll often drink a few bottles on the back deck together when I go to see them.
We have this in Western Canada too! Many places in BC do it. I would like to share a positive experience I've had. If you go up to $5-8 a bottle, there are some really high quality grapes you can get.
There is one grape juice supplier called Château-Vieux-du-Roi which is from a region close to where Châteauneuf-du-Pape is produced in France. We have taken Châteauneuf-du-Pape bottles and put the Château-Vieux-du-Roi wine inside. Blind taste tests from folks who have had the real Châteauneuf-du-Pape often fail to tell the difference.
We have to age the knock-off Château-Vieux-du-Roi for 2-3 years to get it to the same quality, but by golly is it ever delicious wine. If you're impatient, it's still quite tasty after only 6 months to a year of aging in the bottle.
Considering a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape goes for a minimum of $30 CAD, it's an incredible savings.
I always heard a mixture of wine and soda pop called a "wine cooler", a use that would have gone back several decades, but Wikipedia seems to think that specifically means a mix of fruit juice and wine. There is some discussion in the talk page about this discrepancy. I guess maybe the term was a regional thing.
1. you buy 5 gallons of grape juice for ~$20 per gallon.
2. yeast is dropped into your grape juice
3. you come to the store to decant your grape juice into wine bottles and cork them up.
Since no alcohol is bought or sold, you avoid the (very high) taxes on liquor. You end up with ~28 bottles of wine for ~$4 per bottle.
It's not the greatest wine, but it's ok for sangria and cooking, and it's a good story if you hang out with people who like to talk about tax loopholes...