It’s midnight and all you have to do is move the wine, via siphoning tube, from one demijohn into two 23-litre carboys and two 4-litre glass jugs.

Two hours earlier, you had stood before the demijohn of chardonnay on the concrete floor of your basement. The wine appeared clear and bright even though it rested on a well-defined, oatmeal-coloured glutinous layer at the bottom of the glass vessel. Your task for the evening was to separate the limpid liquid from the sediment – a sopping collection of dead yeast and particulate matter. Your choice to do this now was one of a host of decisions towards the finished character of the wine. You could have left the wine on the dead yeast (the lees) for another couple weeks, or longer. The wine might benefit but it could also suffer from an overbearing yeasty aroma and an aggressive bitterness.
Even as you watch the slightly greenish-gold liquid travel away from the lees through the siphon hose to the sterilized carboy, you wonder if you’re doing the right thing.

Home winemaking is methodical, slow, sensual, enlightening, occassionally sloppy and happens mostly during the hours when you would normally be sleeping. If any of this sounds appealing, I suggest you give it a whirl.

It’s mesmerizing to watch the wine moving on its own from one vessel to another, thanks to atmospheric pressure and the partial vacuum created by the draining point being lower than the reservoir. There’s nothing to do but attend to this process; if you leave it alone, having fashioned some contraption to keep the tube in place, you risk overfilling the carboy or sucking lees into the very wine you are attempting to liberate from the fermentation debris. Besides, having “nothing to do but attend” in a room redolent with fruit and yeast is relaxing, even nourishing.

Even though you’re just sitting there holding the siphon tube, your senses are working. Your wine sensibility is broadening. The smell of slightly raw, newly fermented chardonnay is gaining purchase in your memory, as is the particular yeasty aroma of wet lees. You’re also appreciating the enlivening effect of air on wine, which up to that point has been deprived of it. Sure, you know this from decanting, but this new wine is eager to express itself, like a child acquiring language. The effect of air on the wine’s aroma is indisputable. Furthermore, oxygenation at this stage in a wine’s development is necessary for its health. You’re learning this too and getting a sense of how much air a developing wine needs.

Still, it’s midnight and you don’t know where the last two hours went. Volumes of time must have gone down the drain while you rinsed carefully and “sterilized” (with citric acid and sulphur solution) the surface of every object and vessel that would come into contact with the wine. One of the early lessons of winemaking is that most of the work involves cleaning: preparing surfaces for wine and scrubbing wine from surfaces.

A good way to start your education about winemaking is to visit the Amateur Winemakers of Ontario (AWO) website (www.makewine.com). The AWO has several clubs in London and area and is run by a dynamic, informed, experienced and dedicated group of people who are well-connected to local vineyards that supply quality fruit or juice or crushed grapes for home winemaking. These folks may be amateurs, but they’re professional.

I recommend you steer clear of wine kits. No matter how good the kit is, it’s not the real thing. After all, you really aren’t making cookies if the dough came from a Pillsbury tube.
Winemaking is less about creating than it is about skillfully navigating towards a delicious idea. Making your own wine is an act with rather than of creation. It invites you to think about wine in basic terms and outside the many trappings of the wine trade.
I highly recommend it.