Good Morning!

I have the great fortune to be involved in a circle of amazing home winemakers. This all start back 12-13 years ago when I still lived in Indiana. There are people all over the world making wine. Wine can be made out of anything that can decompose, I know how gross that sounds but stay with me on this, I promise you might expand your mind and palette a bit.

OK, so my first winemaking class the winemaker says, If something can rot, you can make wine….I almost fainted. But once I took a step back and started thinking about it he is right. I thought about my friends who’s dad’s used to make some weird hooch in their basement and garages growing up. Many of us were raised on or around farms and My parents had a 3 acre apple orchard and we made cider every year. We had pears and we also had an acre garden with any veggie known to man, so I could have been making wine as a kid, I just did not connect the dots.

Then I heard how if you go to jail and you would take your orange juice and put it in a dark spot for ten days then pull the “top layer” off, the juice that was left would rock you out of your socks! Hahaha, I hope to never have to try that. Anyway, wine is really yeast and fruit working against each other. Natural yeast is flying all in the environment and if you took any fruit and just burst the skin or peel or outside to expose some of the flesh, the yeast will grab on and yeast will find the nature a sugars, fructose, and once those two meet, well, the yeast will turn the sugar in to alcohol and the process is on.

So back to wine, once I met some other winemakers we started sharing resources, like tanks, barrels, fruit ( Like raspberries, currants etc), then I met folks who were working with grapes and not just concord grapes making sweet wines. We wold pool our money and buy riesling, chardonnay, zinfandel, cabernet, barolo you name it we were machines. The really cool thing was how expereimental some of these guys would get. At first I wanted to only make the veritial of that grape, then we started each one of us making a batch, bringing in the wines and tasting, then we would start blending. One batch I made was half Viognier and half zinfandel, it looked like a blush wine but it was dry, everyone there LOVED it. The real test was to take it to my friends and see what they thought, those fools took one look and thought I was making White Zin and decided they did not want sweeter wines….I would have been mad but I had 3 cases all for myself!

We would trade wines all the time make 4 cases each and then trade with each other. I loved the fellowship and going to someone’s garage in February and tasting and catching up with life was awesome.

When I moved to California, these folks are not joking. These people have bought property and they are managing a backyard filled with 15 year old zines and when we would barrel taste, I have had much better wines from a garage than most tasting rooms in the world will ever offer.

So the next time you are offered some “Homemade” wine, try it. You might just be surprised! That is how I got started…you might be witnessing something really special.

Much LOVE and wine,
Cheers, Tammi