From Vine to Wine
Part 1: Catching the Home Winemaking Bug
By
Steve Trabun
By day, Steve Trabun is a Project Consultant
with Avista Corporation. In his off-time,
he and his wife Dana have been making a journey-to vineyards far and
wide, seeking fellow "wineaus" (others who appreciate fine wines),
and toward their own "perfect bottle." It's a hobby that is hard to
beat when it comes to sharing the fruits of your labor with friends
and family. We invite you to follow along on the trip as we present
the first installment of this ongoing series.
Part 1
Catching the Home Winemaking Bug
My wife Dana and I got started with home winemaking around
Christmas in 2000, after many years of watching family members do
the homebrew thing. I visited Jim's Homebrew here in Spokane
to explore what it was all about. I thought it would be a fun gift
idea, and maybe even a new hobby for Dana. Little did I know that
making wine would become one of the greatest hobbies that we would
share together.
Bob Ketcham, owner of Jim's Homebrew, would become our newest
friend and winemaking mentor. In fact, Bob and his staff get most of
the credit for introducing us to this hobby, and to connecting us
with grape growers in Prosser, Washington. Bob sold us everything we
would need to get started with our new hobby, including our initial
"wine kit," with concentrated wine juice and all of the necessary
additives (pre-measured). His advice was to just follow the
directions that came with the kit; his gentle way of directing us
toward drinkable results.
 And
for the next year and a half, we made wine after wine from these
kits- chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, zinfandel, shiraz and
pinot noir. We were such novices and so far from being actual
vintners with a background in enology (the study of winemaking). Our
journey has been both entertaining and educational, and we've always
enjoyed our "stumbles" down the path.
When we first began drinking wine, we enjoyed chardonnay
described as "having hints of vanilla flavor." Not knowing how to
produce such a flavor in our home winemaking adventures, we added
whole vanilla beans during the fermenting process in hopes of
imparting hints of vanilla in our own wine! Fortunately the wine
wasn't ruined, but it didn't make much of a difference either. We
had no idea until we started talking to true wine connoisseurs that
descriptions of a wine's character had nothing to do with added
flavorings, but were actually aspects of the traditional evaluations
used by tasters to describe a wine.
The great part of the wine kit experience was that it always
resulted in a wine of respectable quality that would satisfy our new
love of
drinking it, and giving it as gifts for our friends. It also allowed
us to focus on the creative aspects, such as coming up with our own
brand name (TreVino, our translation for "more wine"), designing
labels and learning to wax-dip bottles like the boutique wineries
we've visited during our marathon wine tasting excursions.
Our new hobby intrigued our family and friends. We invited them
to join us to bottle our new wines, always coming up a few bottles
short from all the tasting. And we held winemaking parties, inviting
Bob from Jim's Homebrew to demonstrate the process of making wine
from kits for groups of our friends. It was definitely the new
millennium version of a "Pampered Chef" or "Tupperware" party. In
the end, the same winemaking bug that bit Dana and I captured the
interest of our guests as well.
Part 1
| Part 2 | Part 3
| Part 4
The Trabun's journey "From Vine to Wine" will continue next
month!
Click here to send any comments or questions to Steve.
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