Jim's Brain Online

My wife bought a wine making kit last weekend, intending to pick the grapes in our backyard and use them to create wine. Amusingly, it turned out that unlike last year when we had so many grapes that we had to give them away, this year we had perhaps one bunch.

Thus, Kristen ended up going to the store to buy grapes to reach the minimum amount needed.

She needn't have bothered. According to the book on wine making she bought, you can apparently make wine from anything that isn't nailed down. This includes fruit (peaches, apple, raspberries, blueberries...), but also stuff you'd never expect such as carrots, turnips, potatoes and beets.

I'm mildly interested in trying some of the weirder ones. This interest is mixed with another thought that goes something like this, "If beet wine were any good, they'd sell it in stores, right?"

I've never seen beet wine in stores. Not even at one of our local liquor stores whose freezers on the same day contained not only a half eaten sandwich, but also a large piece of cheese that had turned grayish-green from mold.

Vegetable wines apparently don't even meet their low standards.

For the moment, however, Kristen seems to be limiting herself to grapes. She's stirring the stuff daily, checking to see if it's fermenting, and generally waiting for the point at which she can move the wine out of the plastic bucket and into actual wine bottles. After that it will age in our cellar for six months.

At this point we will have to make a choice. Should we drink it all ourselves or should we inflict it on our friends and relatives?

I lean toward drinking it all ourselves. That way there will be no witnesses if we have to throw it all out.

My wife is a wonderful person and I'm sure that she can become quite good at making wine if she wants to, but I've done a bit of reading on winemaking recently. Here, as I understand them, are the stages hobbyists go through when making wine:

1. Actually making the wine. Everything seems possible in this stage.
2. Aging the wine. The hobbyist waits with growing anticipation.
3. Inviting your friends to drink the wine.
4. Actually drinking the wine. At this point it is discovered that the wine is not only bad, but it is actually the worst wine made by a sentient being in the history of the universe.
5. Your friends are all very polite.
6. The vomiting begins.
7. You don't want to know about 7.

So, anyway... The wine will be ready in six months. I'll tell you more when it happens.