Tanks, Hoses and Barrels: Your Wine Making Essentials

For most people, wine is a drink reserved for those with money to spend. Wine has become associated with the finer things in life, an element of high living and elitist society.

With the prices that fine wines can reach, who can blame them? Fine wines can reach thousands of dollars per bottle at auctions! Of course, there are also those who do not find wine to their taste. But for those who do appreciate wine, it is as close to heavenly ambrosia as they can get.

Wine is a heady mix of flavours and smells, an incredible, almost alchemic quality in its aromas and tastes. Wine tasting is a favoured activity among modern "nobles", the rich and famous.

Wine can have many layers, with sensory stimuli only explainable through experiences. Of course, wine has to be made. Wine making supplies and equipment for large-scale operations can be huge, space-consuming, and expensive. For the home wine maker or small-scale enterprises, however, wine making kits might be more accessible and appropriate.

Wine making kits contain everything needed to make wine in small batches. There's nothing very fancy in the actual wine making process, and that also goes for the equipment.

The largest part of these kits is the tanks and barrels. Barrels are actually optional, as they are used only in the aging process; though for some, they are essential for tradition's sake.

Wine making kits also have hoses for piping everything along. Bottles and corks may be included. The newest corks are usually made of synthetic materials, and no longer of cork wood. These corks are said to keep wine better, as they keep air out better than the porous cork material. The fruit to be used, wine grapes, and yeast should also be available wherever these kits are sold.

Wine making kits are available from specialty stores. These specialty home wine making supply stores often double as meeting places for small-scale and home wine makers.

More than place to buy equipment and ingredients, these stores are places of information exchange, and camaraderie through common interests. Communities that have these will also regularly hold wine-tasting parties, where local wine makers taste each other's wines and compare notes.

The atmosphere in the small-scale wine making world is certainly looser than that of the traditional wine making regions.

Even with the right tools, wine making is not a simple matter. After all, wine making kits are only as good as the wine making knowledge you possess. If you can, ask more experienced fellow wine makers for advice on how to get started. They are more than likely to lend helping hands.

Things like choice of wine grapes, yeast, methods of extraction and fermentation -- these are things you might want to ask tips for.

After buying a wine making kit, ingredients, and setting everything up, you are finally ready to start making wine! Wine making takes skill, discipline, and most of all, patience.

It may be months or years before you can even taste the fruits of your labour. Some will say the wait is worth it. And yet others would say that it is the wait that makes the reward sweeter. Regardless of which beliefs you subscribe to, you have to be prepared to wait. Needless to say, good things come to those who wait.