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Make Your Own Wine in Raleigh

Carafe Wine Makers Owner

Did you know in Raleigh you can buy “homemade” wine as cheap or cheaper than you can buy for retail?You’ve probably heard about home brewing, but what about home wine making? It’s been around for awhile but as you can imagine the process can take yearrrs depending on the grapes of the season. Gosh, that takes a lot of waiting and patience…more than I can say I have.
We stopped at Carafé Wine Makers, a microwinery in Raleigh that sells wine that they keep bottled (isn’t it supposed to be barreled?) …before the finishing process.

Most wine bottles are $8.95 to $10.95. Anyway, we went in for a complimentary wine tasting (and you can too…). I liked the Cab Merlot …I’m not usually a Merlot fan at all as they’re generally very robust and too oaky tasting for me…but this one was light. I also liked their Italian Rosso Fortissimo Reserve. Another interesting choice for me as most Italian wines aren’t the best that I’ve tried. But Italian foods have got some of the best eats…hey, u can’t be good at everything!

At Carafe Wine Makers, Ken Crosson is one of the owners that we met. He gave us a tour of the store. And he explained and showed us parts of the wine making process including preparation, fermentation, clarification, filtration, then corking and labeling. Sounds like a lot of process-ing work to me. But as bonus, you can bring in your own private label stickers for the wines. They ship too so that may make a good gift.