The Craft-Wine Making Process
With Carafe Meadowvale
Let us professionally craft wine comparable to LCBO for the fraction of the price! Choose from over 100+ varietals from every single continent, we are confident you’ll find a favorite (we also do custom blends) or we’ll even suggest one that matches your pallette, occassion and food pairing.
Each batch of wine we produce makes 30 bottles. You can bring in your own wine bottles and or we can provide them to you (at an additional fee) and within the price of each batch of wine includes corks, seals and of course – production of the wine. We take the science and work out of wine making!
Once you have figured out what type of wine you like, you’ll need to schedule an appointment to come in to get the wine process started.
During your initial visit, there’s a small packet of yeast that you’ll need to add to your desired grape juice to get the wine making process started. This typically only takes a few minutes!
As a fun fact, making the wine yourself means the grape juice in your wine is taxed as produce which means it’s tax exempt! This equates to savings in your pocket as opposed to purchasing wine at the retail level.
Within the next next 4-8 weeks (depends on what varietal you choose), we take care of all the processing steps like the fermentation, racking, and filtering of your wine up the point of bottling. We normally provide a timeline with when you can expect to bottle your wine.
When you come in for your bottling appointment, we’ll sterilize your bottles for you (or you can buy new ones from us for $1.50/bottle). Once you topped up your bottles, we have a pneumatic corking machine to help speed up the process, and then afterwards shrink-wrap the tops in the colour of your choice, and apply your labels (some of our batches include labels and some don’t, you can even opt to work with our in-house designer to make your very own!) You’ll also get a chance to sample your wine during the bottling.
Our wine is developed to be drank young, however you can also take the opportunity to age the wine in your wine cellar and experience the subtle difference in the taste that develops over time. We typically don’t recommend storing the wine for longer than 2 years however, we observed that our wine is at it’s prime with about 4-8 months of aging. Your mileage may differ but we encourage you to experiment!