Do-it-yourself vino

When Larry Cox opens a bottle of wine while dining at home with friends, he is especially eager to hear their opinion.

“Good friends will tell you if it needs more fruit or less fruit,” explained Mr. Cox, an estimator for an asphalt company. “Good friends will tell you the truth.”

He is interested in their opinion because the wine didn’t come from the local wine store or winery — he made it himself. Mr. Cox, 46, who lives in Fulton, Mo., began making his own wine four years ago.

He is one of a growing number of home winemakers in the U.S., where wine consumption has grown by a third since 1995, according to the Wine Institute, an association of California wineries.

Brad Ring, the publisher of WineMaker magazine, estimates there are about 1 million active hobbyists who make their own wine at least once a year.

While home winemakers don’t need vineyards or grape stompers, a bit of equipment is required. Wine can be made from any fruit, but beginners usually start out with wine kits — available at home-brew stores and online — that contain juice concentrate.

“Sales of winemaking equipment have been growing at a fairly good clip, up about 20 percent a year,” over the past several years, said Ron Hartman, president of LD Carlson, a brewing and winemaking wholesaler. He estimates the wine kit retail business alone is worth about $30 million to $50 million a year.

Kits contain everything needed to make wine: buckets used for fermenting, a hydrometer used to measure the amount of sugar in wine, an airlock to let carbon dioxide out, a siphon to transfer the wine, and wine bottles and corks.

The process usually takes one to two months. Once bottled, it could take one or two years for the wine to mature. Home winemakers usually spend about $250 to $500 a year on the hobby.

“It’s really a messy business,” said Debra Reiter.

Miss Reiter, 50, a project manager for BP Amoco and a wine aficionado, recently picked up the hobby as a way to learn more about wine.

“The best way to learn something about what you love is to do it yourself,” she said.

Miss Reiter, who lives in a suburb of Chicago, took a winemaking class at a local home brew shop and then mixed her own first batch in October using concentrate from Tuscan grapes from Italy.

She started a winemaking club last month, Corkers without Borders, which quickly gained 15 members.

“It’s really intriguing; there’s a lot more chemistry and a lot more science to it than I originally thought, as well as art,” she said. “But we’ve been making wine since the time before Christ, so it’s not rocket science.”

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