Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsThese kits can make a pretty decent wine
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2018
These kits can make a pretty decent wine, but you'll need these things:
1) A basic knowledge of making wine from a kit. Search the interwebs and YouTube if you lack this knowledge.
2) The understanding that cheaper kits like this are best made to 5 gallons rather than 6 gallons if you want something comparable to a $7-$10 bottle of store bought wine.
3) A few items to tweak these kits to be their best (I'm mostly referring to the red wine kits here): Medium toast oak chips, wine tannin (both available from Amazon or your local home brew supply store), and a box of zante currants (raisins made from black corinth grapes) - or you could do something like draining, rinsing, and sautéing a can of pie cherries. Search the Kit Forums on winemakingtalk.com for the "Tweaking Cheap Kits" thread.
4) Basic equipment (e.g., a 7.9 gallon brew bucket, and 5-gallon carboy with drilled stopper and airlock, and hydrometer to measure specific gravity and potential alcohol percentage, an auto siphon and siphon hose, a bottle filler, a product to sanitize every piece of equipment and vessel that will touch the wine such as Star San or potassium metabisulfite).
5) Of course you'll need ~24 wine bottles, corks (I like synthetic corks), and a corking tool. If you think you're going to continue this hobby, a floor corker is a great investment.
Remember, cleanliness and sanitation are keys to success.
If you have the space, after secondary fermentation has finished, siphon the wine to a clean/sanitized 5-gallon carboy (along with 1/4 tsp. potassium metabisulfite to keep the wine from being damaged by exposure to oxygen). Top up the carboy with a similar wine if needed so that there's no air except in the neck of the carboy, then put in a stopper/airlock and let it bulk age for 2-3 months in a relatively cool, dark place. That will allow most of the sediment to drop out and allow the wine to begin to develop. Then siphon off of the sediment in the carboy to a clean/sanitized bucket, add another 1/4 tsp. or so of potassium metabisulfite, degas the wine, use the clarifiers that came with the kit, transfer back to a clean/sanitized carboy, wait a week or so, and then siphon the wine off of the new sediment into a clean/sanitized bucket and bottle (into clean/sanitized bottles).
Patience is the key. Despite the claim that kits like these are a "28-day wine", you'll want to give it 5-6 months after secondary fermentation ended to start enjoying if you want something that resembles store bought wine. And after that it should continue to improve over the course of the next few months.
