Vintner's Reserve Shiraz 10L Wine Kit

• Type:Red
• Body:Medium
• Sweetness:Dry
• Medal Winner:2008 Gold Award
• Food Pairings:Excellent with pepper steaks and london broils

Winexpert produces several different series of wine kits. Their Eclipse and Selection International series are their more expensive kits, while the Vintner's Reserve series are more reasonable. Nevertheless, all their kits are excellent. Although their more expensive series make the best wines (as one would hope), the wines in their Vintner's Reserve series are still great. The kits in this series are priced in the $60 range. Since each kit makes approximately 30 750ML bottles, this works out to not much more than two dollars a bottle. That's a great bargain for a very good wine.

I made the Vintner's Reserve Shiraz some time ago. It's an excellent, full-bodied wine, with a spicy fruitiness that is pleasant to the taste. Although it begins to develop within three months of bottling, new overtones come out with further aging. I would suggest aging for as much as a year to allow the wine to develop fully.

Like all Winexpert kits, the Shiraz comes with easy-to-follow instructions. The process from initial mixing to bottling takes approximately six weeks. I find that the total time I spend producing wine from one of these kits is three to four hours. Making excellent wine doesn't need to be time-consuming.