I kind of want to try the garlic wine.
I had never heard of sparkling shiraz until a few years ago. I was at Fox Creek winery and the owner told me that the staff liked the wine so much that they drank the flat leftovers from tasting at the end of each day. It is very good but now is blended with a little Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc.
Also interesting to note that the OP’s friend chose the classic singularly worst spot in a house to store his wine. Near the fridge an environment with heat changes, light and vibration - all the enemies of wine storage.
If it was labeled and sold as Worcestershire Wine then perhaps you would have a point.
If you want buy garlic wine and cook with it then by all means proceed. You can have my share.
I had an Italian version of this and enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s definitely more of a liqueur than what you would think of as wine, but if you enjoy it on its own merits it’s nice.
I had garlic wine in Kyoto. I would take it over red and white any day. My favorite however is sweet plum wine.
An elderly relative once served me a glass of homemade elderberry wine. It wasn’t very good, but as a fan of Arsenic and Old Lace, it was fun to try it.
For similar literary reasons, I’d love to try some dandelion wine, but have never had the chance.
You’re right; it’s definitely more like a liqueur. In fact, aside from a sweet sparkling wine, it’s the only wine my hubby will drink. At dessert time after Christmas dinner, even my 10YO gets a bit of the ice wine. (It’s very low alcohol content, I think somewhere around 7%, but I’m too lazy to get up from my computer right now and go check the bottle I have in my wine cabinet!)
People, Eiswein (or icewine) is NOT a liqueur. A liqueur is a flavored alcohol which has sugars added to it. Wines are made from grapes alone while liqueurs can be made from spices, nuts, herbs, etc – but then sugar is ADDED.
Eiswein is made from grapes which are left on the vine to the point where they start to raisin and the sugars concentrate. They are picked at a point when the water in them starts to freeze but the concentrated sugars do not, hence the unctuous, sweet quality. Without the freezing component, there are other wines which go through the same process of turning to raisin and getting those concentrated sugars but they are not liqueurs. They are wine.
There is no Italian versions of eiswein, however there are sweet Italian wines. Icewines only occur naturally in countries that get a long-enough sustained frost: Germany and Canada. In Italy, they would be known as Passito and is similar to ice wine but sustainable for the warmer climate. Most countries make sweet wines but they are NOT liqueurs and one rarely drinks large glasses of them – hence they are often bottled in smaller format bottles.
I never said it was. I believe what we were saying about it (or at least what I was saying) is that the flavor profile of ice wine has more in common with the taste/thickness of a liqueur than that of a wine.
A guy I dated in college did it with his parents every year. They were from a village in Italy, but they now live in the Bronx.
My parents & grandparents used to make wine from wild grapes (muscadines) and scuppernongs (sp).
It was all over the map from sweet to dry to some sparkling…
No law against it. You’re just not hanging with the right crowd. 
Come on up and I’ll give you a bottle of ours.
We’ve got a garage *full *of homemade wine. And mead. And cider. And beer. 
And there are lots and lots of home winemakers in the US, in this area, and across the country.
Is the wine good?
I’ve had great homemade beer, made by myself and others. Same with mead and hard cider.
But homemade wine? I have yet to taste a homemade wine that is drinkable. Even the cheapest mass-produced cute-named (“Little black penguin in a dress”) wine is better.
If it is good, what’s the trick?
Germany and Canada have become known as very good ice wine producers, but they are being made in lots of other places, including the US, France, Austria, New Zealand, Australia and a few other countries.
And never one to shy away from unconventional methods, Randall Graham was making his version of an ‘ice wine’ for Bonny Doon a few years ago by picking grapes at normal sugar levels, then freezing them off the stems in a giant ice box.
His resulting Vin de Glaciere was quite good, and very reasonably priced.
For the folks that like that style of dessert wine, I’d also highly recommend a botrytised wine like Sauternes or Barsac from France, or Trockenbeerenauslese from Germany or Austria, and most definitely a Tokaji from Hungary. The latter remains the most unusual wine I’ve tried to date. I was fortunate enough to taste a Tokaji Essencia a couple of years ago, and proceeded to lick my lips for like a week after. An amazing wine and very deserving of the nickname liquid gold.
It is very good. My husband and I have passed the winemaking bug on to some friends that are making delicious wine. And we know a few other folks around town that are making delicious wine.
I think for us, one major part of our good luck is vicinity to good grapes. We’re able to find some really spectacular fruit to start with, practically in our back yard.
The rest is just attention to detail I think. Rack at the right time, make your acid adjustments, do your sulphur additions diligently, watch your time in barrel (we have had a couple of batches taste like ‘oak tea’, but we were able to blend them to a very good final wine.) So, just stuff like that really.
We usually do a secondary wine with our pumice, and then we blend, blend, blend until we have a final product that appeals to our tastes. And then we bottle and wait.
Wine is fun, but it requires a lot more patience than beer, which was a little hard for us when we did our first vintage a few years ago, but now that we’ve got so much in so many different stages of the process, it’s a lot more fun. And it’s really fun to trade bottles with other home winemakers.
PS - If anyone cares to follow the progress of our various fermentation experiments, my husband usually posts updates on Facebook under the name of our garage ‘winery’ - Chateau Ghettaux. Add us! 
I also recommend Tokaji. Note, however, that not all Tokaji is botrytized. Some, such as Tokaji Furmint, is dry. The most well-known botrytized versions are Tokaji Szamorodni and Tokaji Aszu. In Aszu, the concentration of botrytized wine is indicated by the number of puttonyos, ranging from 3 to 6. I’ve had a 3, which was a nice but rather ordinary dessert wine, and a 5, which was superb. There is also apparently a category called Aszu-Eszencia which has more than 6 puttonyos.
Now this is a bit confusing, but there is also a kind of Tokaji simply called eszencia. To make it, botrytized grapes are picked individually and placed in vats; eszencia is made entirely from the juice that runs out naturally before the grapes are pressed. Presumably that’s what psycat90 was lucky enough to try.
You got it. I’ve had several 3 puttonyos, and one 6. Seriously delicious wines, but the Eszencia I tried was amazing. I might have promised my first born to the pal that let me sample it.
You can brew up to 100 gallons of beer or wine for one person, or 220 gallons per household with more than one adult, for your own personal use in most states in the US.
Chicago has a pretty healthy wine making tradition, especially among immigrant populations. Every year, around September or October, there’s at least two open air grape markets in the Chicago area that sell crates of grapes from California (and perhaps other regions) for winemaking. One of my friends has an old grape press in his cellar, and every year we buy about a thousand bucks worth of grapes and make wine out of them.
ETA: And, yes, the wine is good. We did have one year sour on us, but everything else, it’s a bottle of wine I’d happily pay $10-$15 at the store.
I think that must be the trick. Every homemade wine I’ve tried has started with some sort of extract or juice, and it’s been awful.
brb going to psycat90 and Demo’s house to try their wine.