So I was wasting some time on Amazon, when I came upon these Mini Wine Pak dealies that promise to make you some delicious wine, at home, in just 10 days and for less money than you’d pay for wine instore (in Canada at least. Bleh Sin taxes can eat a butt.). And I was like, “Hey! I’m a stingy alcoholic. This is perfect for me!”, so I bought the merlot and chardonnay winemaking kits.
Fun Fact: since grape juice and yeast are technically grocery items, I wasn’t charged any tax for this stuff and they didn’t verify my age either!
The boxes arrived in a couple of days. They weren’t refrigerated or anything, because the contents are pasteurized and shelf-stable, I suppose.
Everything in the boxed seemed a bit jumbled-up. I think that mailman that hates me has been throwing my boxes around again. Everything was still intact, though, so whatever.
The things inside the box were: a dispensing pouch, a fermenting pouch, grape juice concentrate, yeast wine starter, sulphite sorbate wine stopper, keiselsol clearing wine and chitosan clearing wine. Everything has a big letter that corresponds to the step-by-step instructions.
It’s amazing that you need such small amounts of yeast and chemicals are required in the winemaking process. Each of these pouches is only about 4 centimetres wide and almost flat.
The instructions are easy to follow, but the guy on them is making Dreamworks Face, so I dislike them.
The first step call for filling up the fermenting pouch halfway with water, but there is no halfway line on the bag, so you have to eyeball it. I’m bad at guesstimating and having to do so causes me anxiety.
Then you have to add the grape juice concentrate to the water. I couldn’t for the life of me get the stupid stopper on the grape juice pouch out, so I had to cut a hole in the corner in order to pour it out.
Once you have your grape juice added, you fill the pouch to the line with more water, then add the yeast wine starter, close the pouch’s cap tightly and shake the pouch vigorously. After that, you open the cap a bit, so that gas can escape during the fermentation process.
The yeast activates immediately and starts to foam-up.
Here are my pouches of merlot and chardonnay fermenting side-by-side. They don’t look very appetizing at the moment.