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!

Being Green & Healthy At The Same Time

The wine you make with us means that the bottles you bring in (or bottled with previously) are recycled via our in-house sterilization process. That means we are doing our part to keep bottles out of landfills.  Outside of the health benefits our wine you may have heard, you’ll be pleased to know our wines have less than approximately 1/7th the preservatives of the majority of those produced commercially. (We also were told it means no more headaches!)

Custom Labels At A Price To Customization That’s Is Unmatched

Full Time In-house Graphic Artist & Production Printer At Your Service

We specialize in premium custom wine labels made to order. Our in-house designed labels provide the perfect way to make your wine truly unique, whether it’s a gift for family, friends, colleagues or for that special someone, or if you are looking to personalize the wine for your upcoming wedding, corporate event, or birthday party, your options are limited by your imagination!

Book an appointment with our in-house designer whom will sit down with you and go over your requirements. Our in-house designer is even able to create novelty labels (there are no limits!) and can design something with a quick customer sketch. Labels are printed on-site and can be available on-demand, printed on custom glossy labels with a commercial production printer.

You can bring and or email your graphics, logo’s, images as well as a a description of what you’d like to include in your design and we’ll draft a mock design in real time!

Got your own design? Let us know and we’ll provide you with the label specifications for print.

For more questions, feel free to call/visit the store for more details.

Want to send us your design?

Our label size are 4.25″ x 3.375″ however, if you are looking for an edge-to-edge print, be sure to include an additional 0.25″ of printing buffer (bleed). TL;DR – send us a design with the following dimensions: 4.50″ x 3.625″

Additional designer information:

  • All file formats are acceptable. Preferrable, PNG, AI/EPS, PSD
  • Any JPG’s should ideally be 300PPI CMYK and highest resolution