To experience a variety of wines at a reasonable cost, we recommend building your own wine cellar that will be the envy of all your neighbours. All you need to do is calculate how much wine you’ll need, what kinds of wine you would like to brew and set yourself a schedule.
Begin by determining how much wine you consume annually. Include your daily glasses with dinner, weekend dinner parties, friends dropping by, birthdays, anniversaries, holiday weekends and gift giving. Don’t forget to split your preferences for red and white and include pink and dessert for special occasions.
Multiply your weekly consumption by 52 and then add 15-20% for unexpected wine emergencies. If you figure you need around 180 bottles in total, that works out to six 23-L batches per year. We recommend that you make twice your yearly expected consumption, in as short a period as possible, ideally all within one or two months. This is 12 batches, all in one fell swoop.
Put half of the wine away in your cellar. At the end of one year start opening those fully aged bottles, and enjoy the tremendous improvement that good cellaring can bring.
If making 12 batches of wine at once is problematic, then we suggest that you make two batches every time you make one. Bottle one for your use, and put the other in your personal cellar. Or, get together with a group of friends. Each of you brew a different kind of wine and then share the proceeds. If six friends brew wine together, you could potentially have 5 bottles of 6 different types of wine!
Most people think they need to drink an entire batch before they start another but by brewing wine every two months, you’ll always have a variety of wine on hand for parties and gift giving.
The Wine Butler would like to remind all it’s customers, to always drink responsibly.