Forgive the long post.
As I mentioned in a post on another thread of yours, I too come to wine making from being a long time beer brewer, I made my first batch of home brew in 1985. If you can make good beer, and I have no reason to believe you can't, then you will absolutely be able to make good wine. The knowledge and skill set from brewing lends itself very well to wine making IMO. I find wine making much more forgiving than brewing, and with kits at least there is less work up front and more work on the end with wine, again IMO. I want to offer up some unsolicited advice brewer to brewer but first a brief history of my wine making to date.
I made two batches of wine in mid 2015. a banana wine made from whole bananas and it is to date my only non-kit wine. After this was bulk aging I found on homebrewfinds.com a deal on a 6 gal. Cellar Craft Showcase Old Vine Lodi Zinfandel kit, a somewhat high end kit for a very good price. So I bought it and made it, bulk aged it in a corny keg for 6 months then bottled it and let it age for 4-6 months which the instructions advised. It seemed OK, but didn't knock my socks off. I had made a mistake or two on this first batch so confidence was not high for it. Gave some bottles to friends and family that drink wine and didn't get much feedback except that it was "good". I basically then forgot about it and it sat in my cellar. Fast forward to just before Thanksgiving 2018, one of my adult children stop by and ask if I have anything to drink, I tell her you know I have a 4 tap kegerator in the basement of course I have something to drink. She asks about the red wine I had made and asked for a bottle. I gave it to her and she took it home. The next day she stopped by and asked for another bottle and said Dad that is really good wine, I said something like oh yeah? thanks She said no Dad it is really really good. So I popped a bottle open and Wow, I thought, I could drink wine like this all the time! I was taken aback how much aging had improved this wine.
I went off on wine making and bought more of these Cellar Craft Showcase kits, plus some other somewhat high end kits like RJS Private Reserve and others. I also found this website about that time. Somewhere here I found a post about Wine Maker Magazine's competition and would enter this 2015 Zin in the 2019 competition and sent them off in February or March 2019 IIRC. Between December 2018 and May 2019 I had made 13 6 gal batches of various red wine kits and 2 6 gal batches of white wine kits. The judging was held in April 2019 and to say I was surprised would be an understatement. I was looking for honest opinions from people who know wine and do not know me. I won a silver medal in the Zinfandel category. I was tickled pink! I'm not writing all this to brag but to let you know that a competent brewer can make very good wine from a good kit at least even the very first time even making relatively small mistakes!
I didn't make any wine last year because I had my hip replaced but this year so far since December 2020 I have 20 6 gal batches already in progress and plan at least 8 more batches this calendar year. I also plan on making 2 6 gal batches per month year round now so I have a pipeline of good wine to drink. I'm on a mission, because well I popped the first bottles of the 2019 vintage around this past Thanksgiving and have put a serious dent in these batches from both sharing and drinking them. Now to the meat of what I want to tell you.
When I read your original post about "8wk young drinking wines" I interpret that as cheaper kits. Maybe I'm wrong with my interpretation of your comment but I've read other comments here and elsewhere, and I believe these comments, that one gets what one pays for in a wine kit! I'm not saying one can't make a decent or even good wine from a cheaper kit, I've never tried to be honest. There is a member named Joe that posts extensively about tweaking cheap kits and I've no doubt his techniques work.
If this is your thinking, i.e. starting with cheaper kits, I want you to know that as a competent brewer one is in excess of 90% knowledgeable in the wine fermenting process. I'm not saying you have nothing to learn but feel you may be wasting time and money dilly dallying with cheaper kits if that is in fact your intention. There is a brand new line of wine kits called Finer Wine kits sold through LabelPeelers.com that seem to be head and shoulders above the kits I've used so far and judging by the comments from many more experienced wine makers on the thread here, many also believe this. Only time will tell of course but many seem to have very high expectations from this new line of kits.
These Finer Wine kits also give the wine maker the option to buy no grape skins, and drink it sooner, or to buy one grape skin pack which requires more aging according to the instructions, or by two grape skin packs which requires even more aging. AND, they are very very competitively priced! I'd bet dollars to donuts that this pricing is designed to get market share since they are a new type of process in the concentration of the grape juice and I'd bet dollars to donuts that the price will go up if and when these wines live up to the expectations.
I currently have 4 of these Finer Wine kits in progress and definitely plan on making more, many more as a matter of fact.
Thanks for reading this far, hope this helps and remember, while you may be a beginner wine maker, you are not a total beginner because of your home brewing experience, you have much of what you need to make good wine right now. There are a lot of very helpful and very experienced folks on this site but don't be afraid to use your judgement as a brewer.
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