Welch's Wine

Wine, vino, mommy's juice, Chardonnay, Muscat, or Boone's, whatever you call it, it's the nectar of the gods.  Archeological evidence shows wine is one of mankinds earliest food arts.  Additionally winemaking in Europe dates back over 6,500 years ago.  In Sedalia, Missouri, winemaking, in our family, dates back to the early 1980's.

At that time my parents had accumulated a large amount of canned Welch's Grape Juice.  Made from the finest concord grapes grown in the heart of the east coast.  "The story of Welch's began in 1869 in Vineland, New Jersey – when physician and dentist Thomas Bramwell Welch and his son Charles processed the first bottles of "unfermented wine" to use during their church's communion service."  (Information courtesy of the Welch's Grape Juice Website. http://www.welchs.com/) Well, my dad got fed up with the "unfermented" juice and decided brilliantly to make Welch's Wine.

To this day, I'm not sure why my mom agreed to this project.  You see the hardest part of winemaking is growing the grapes, and Welch's had done that part for him already.  In my Dad's enthusiasm, he convinced my mom that he'd be able to make the finest wine from the cans we had stored in the basement.  I'm sure he promised her it would be as good as Boone's Farm, her favorite wine for company dinner.

So after reading several how-to books on the winemaking subject, my dad set up his homemade still.  It was a couple of wine bottles with plastic tubing running from them.  I think the tubes were to help with pressure released during fermentation.  He set it up on a shelf in our sunny yellow dining room, out of the reach of the four sets of little hands in our family.  He proudly showed his winemaking display off to our friends who stopped by.  They would sit around talking about how good the wine was going to be.  I think he even mentioned entering it in the fair if it turned out ok.

Then as with so many early attempts at winemaking, tragedy struck.  It was late one night, a couple of weeks into the project.  Our family was sound asleep, tucked into our beds and dreaming happy dreams.  Suddenly, we were jolted from our sleep by the sounds of exploding glass.  Had someone shot out a window?  Was there a car accident on the street outside of our house?  Sadly, no.  My dad's dreams of becoming the first Welch's Wine maker ended in a shower of glass and a spray of fermenting grape juice all over the yellow walls and white ceiling of our dining room.  It looked like a grape massacre had taken place in our dining room and it smelled pretty nasty too.

My dad learned a valuable lesson: there is a reason wine producers ferment wine in wooden barrels or steel drums.  That way there is no chance of an explosion during the fermentation process.  My mom quickly vetoed any additonal attempts at winemaking in our house.

My dad was deeply disappointed, but for my mom it was a blessing.  She'd been nagging my dad to paint the kitchen and dining room for months.  After the fatal wine explosion, my dad picked up some new paint and re-painted them on his next day off.  Maybe my mom really did know what she was doing when she agreed to let my dad make Welch's wine in the kitchen.