where can we get our grapes made into wine?

usignuolo

My brother in law and I both have vines in our gardens, so does my next door neighbour. We all have a very good crop this year and were wondering about pooling our resources to get our own home grown plonk made.

Anyone know where we could get this done?

Primrose

I don't know of anywhere which would take your grapes and convert it into wine for you on a commercial basis. You would need to produce HUGE quantities of grapes to make it worthwhile, bearing in mind that you need up to 14 lbs of grapes to make just one gallon of wine. The hard option is to buy all the kit and learn how to do it yourself.

You could search around to see if there are any local winemaking societies or clubs in your area whose members might be interested in taking your grapes and making wine with it, but I wouldn't expect them to offer you more than a token bottle in 6 (you generally get six bottles of wine per gallon demijohn). Making quality wine is a jolly hard job and extremely time consuming in terms of all the bottling off from the yeast, filtering, rebottling, and all the associated functions of measuring specific gravity and topping up with the right amounts of sugar etc. We used to make our own wine from our grape vine and were offered somebody else's grapes if we would "go halves" on the amount of wine we produced from them. It would have been a good deal for them, and a lousy deal for us, to get just three bottles of wine out of every gallon for all the time and effort involved. It just wasn't worth it.

Suzy_M

What variety are your grapes? - Unless they are a wine variety they are unlikely to make a decent wine using normal 'commercial' methods so diy will be probably be the way to go.

boongi

If your willing to pool resources with other peoples grapes then I've heard of the urban wine company, they're around London but you could contact them to see if they know of anything in your area.
http://www.urbanwineco.com/index.html

Some vineyards are family run so may be open to you bringing them your harvest to turn into wine. Try contact a few to see what they could offer. In the independent article (see below) they went to
http://www.bookersvineyard.co.uk/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/chateau-tooting-inner-city-vintage-398519.html