Vin de Garage (garage wine)

I made small batches of wine in '94 & '95 and met with some success, but making a 20-gallon batch of wine in big glass water bottles didn't feel like 'the real thing' to me. If I was going to take the time to make wine I wanted to make it in the same way a real winery would, and that meant by the barrel.

I started making wine by the barrel in 1999 in the cold, leaky garage of the house we were renting. In 2004 we moved to a new house that had a much nicer (and drier) garage and basement where I could really control the environment and refine the process. Since then I've purchased a ton of grapes each year, which produces two barrels of wine.