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Making your own booze at home is legal and doesn't have to be restricted to beer. Over the next couple of months Mike Supple will attempt to make his own Cabernet Sauvignon. Follow the process to join in the triumph or laugh at his failure!
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Mike Supple: You're watching Screw It on SuppleWine. I'm your host, Mike Supple. 2010 is upon us and I hope everybody had a fun and safe New Year's Eve - I know I did.

New years mean new projects so I picked up a home wine making kit. Over the next couple of months I will be showing regular video updates here, making my wine. I've never done this before and it's part of the wine industry I'm very interested in so I thought this would be a good way to check it out. While this is on a micro scale - it's very different from doing it in a massive winery - this still will give me a taste, and therefore give you a taste, of what it's like to actually make wine.

If this is something that you're interested in being involved in more than just as a viewer, there are plenty of websites where you can pick up your own kits. They generally cost around $180 and that includes almost everything you'll need. The only thing it doesn't include is the empty bottles to bottle your wine. If you don't have a local home brewing retailer, check out these sites for more info and kits: homebrewers.com, vitnersharvest.com and uselitemicrowinery.com. You can also just Google "home wine making kit."

What does $180 get you? I ended up getting my entire kit from Costco, and for the equipment they included the Vintner's Harvest set. For the wine, they went with US Elite Cabernet Sauvignon concentrated grape juice.

In terms of equipment, we have our 8-gallon fermenter, the lid with an airlock hole, a 6-gallon carboy, the Italian double-lever corker to put the corks in the bottles, a bag of clean synthetic corks, a tube for filling the bottles, 4 feet of tubing for siphoning, a fermometer, rubber stopper, plastic air lock, wax and shot hydrometer and a siphon. I'll explain how we use all of these in the upcoming weeks as we go through the process.

Of course we also have our concentrated Cabernet Sauvignon juice and the various additives we'll be putting in the wine for stabilizing, fermenting, clarifying and adding oak flavors or tannins. I'll of course describe each of these in more detail as they are used in the process.

180 dollars might sound like a lot of money for this all up front, but when you break it down, in the end you'll be making about 30 bottles of wine. That comes out to $6 per bottle. If this wine's any good then that's not a bad price at all. Of course the wine can only be as good as the quality of the juice that you start with, so we'll see how that goes.

That's the whole shebang. The instructions seem fairly easy to follow, so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and hopefully in a couple of months from now I'll have 30 bottles of wine to try out.

If any of you out there decide to jump in the game and get your own kit, let me know. I'd love to swap stories and maybe even swap some bottles.

When we're all done I'm going to do a blind tasting - buy several different Cabernets in the same price point and put them up against my wine. I'll taste along with other impartial tasters and we'll see how it fares. I didn't grow the grapes so if I lose it will be nothing personal against me. If it's good, I want to know. If it's bad, let me waste my money before you go and try it on your own.