Bubbling away in a farmhouse near Camrose, Alta. is the makings of a pleasant sip.
Four times a year Isabelle Nordin and her husband mix up a batch of wine from a kit. A month later, after some additives and some stirring, it’s bottled and ready to drink.
It is a hobby that Nordin started three years ago after taking a wine making course offered by a local brewing store.
“Both of us are wine lovers,” she said. “We just found it expensive to buy our wine in liquor stores.”
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A basic bottle of wine is about $10 in most liquor stores. But a bottle from a home kit, once all the equipment has been purchased, costs $1.50 to $2, said Nordin. And a $40 kit produces about 30 bottles.
But it is more than the cost savings that have made home-made wine kits popular. It is also the quality of the beverage.
“There’s definitely a taste difference,” Nordin said. “The flavor is much more intense from kits. You have to taste wine you’ve made yourself to find the difference.”
That is a change from the past when home-made wine carried an image problem as deep as the sediment on the bottom.
People thought it was “made from onions and cloudy” joked Mike Arthurs, vice-president of Wine Art Inc. The 39-year-old company produces wine kits for sale across Canada.
It is the kits that have put people in their basements stirring up big yeasty containers. The simple instructions and packaged juice and chemicals are a cleaner and easier way than stomping juice out of grapes or pouring in a concoction of overripe vegetables, fruits, sugar and yeast and letting it foam.
Good quality, inexpensive
Arthurs said all wine kit manufacturers offer equivalent good quality and tend to use European, Australian, Californian and Chil-ean grapes. And cheapskates drawn by the price advantage are now staying with the hobby because of the quality, he said.
On a per capita basis, Quebecers make more wine than any other province, but in the West, Arthurs said his company’s best selling stores are in Saskatchewan.
“I guess you have nothing but curling and cold there,” he mused in trying to decide why wine making, and the accompanying wine drinking, are so popular in a winter-locked area.
Wine Art sales have doubled in the past five years, but overall statistics for kit sales are not known, said Roger Randolph of the Canadian Wine Institute. No government liquor board keeps track of the numbers. No permits or reports from this side of the alcohol industry are required, say government spokespeople.
However, the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission has seen a rise in its wine sales, said its vice-president of purchasing, Don Lussier.
“Our Canadian red wine sales are smoking,” he said, attributing it to good publicity about wine’s beneficial effects on heart health.
To Nordin, the health aspect is a bonus but not as important as taste.
