Where to begin?

[Arp30]

So far I’ve made two small (one gallon) batches of wine: plum and blackberry plum. So far so good on both. Where do I go next as a beginner? I’ve only found one or two very limited sources for one gallon ingredient kits. Any ideas where to go for these? Looking for a few thoughtful suggestions.

 

[Rice_Guy]

The good news is you can make wine with about anything (you like) from apple to zucchini. The web is a good place to hunt recipes for your favorite food ingredient.
Kits are available on the web from vendors as “More Wine”. It seems all metro areas have a beer and wine shop with ingredients/ kits and a number of them will have classes where you can share your creation and get feed back. The local wine club is a good place to try products others have done and find areas you want to explore. (or don’t as jalapeño wine). Clubs also share recipes, do joint crushes, sell excess ingredient, source ingredient as 6 gallon grape must buckets from California, Chili, Italy, and drive to NewYork state to buy fresh juice.

For my part I blend flavors from fruit ingredients to build on what the mouth will detect sour, bitter, sweet, and add something with aroma. Then bake a pie to test flavor combinations. ( I like to have an idea how the blend tastes before I dedicate a year in a glass jug!)
I have combinations going as peach rhurbarb where the rhurbarb provides an acid backbone and the peach gives fruity notes. Grape zucchini where the grape gives the backbone and zucchini provided enough liquid volume to fill the carboy. The Favorite last year was Concord grape elderberry. Grape provides aroma, an acid backbone a lot of nutrients to make yeast happy. Elderberry adds bitter and astringent notes to make it more interesting.

Have fun with the flavors you like.

 

[beano]

Try the Dragons Blood wine in the recipes section. Simple and easy to make. Just divide the ingredients to make as much or as little as you like. Very versatile recipe and great to develop wine making skills with.

Beano Joe

 

[salcoco]

https://winemaking.jackkeller.net/index.asp a large number of one gallon recipes as well as lot of information and instructions.

 

[Stressbaby]

There is a reason wine is traditionally made from grapes. You can fool around with all the different fruit/veg/flower wines if you want and you will learn a lot. You will also dump out a LOT of wine.

I take different wines I make once a week to our Thursday night band practice. Last week I took my 2017 OVZ. The comment was "THAT wine I actually LIKE."

Kits, juice, whatever, my advice is move to grapes ASAP.