Hello, Aimee Blanchette here filling in for Kara who is in L.A. with her family for a wedding. Peak wedding season is officially upon us.

I contributed to KaBlog several months ago when I was in the early stages of planning my own wedding. Now I have just two months to go before the BIG DAY. The invitations have been sent and a few nights ago we finished bottling our second batch of wedding wine … yes, wedding wine.

Among all the other things on our plate, we somehow managed to talk ourselves into making our own wine to serve at the wedding. Here me out, though: doing so saved us money, we had fun together, the wine tastes darn good AND it fits our overall “theme” for a homemade wedding.

The idea came about when my future father-in-law (an avid home-brewer) offered to brew the beer for the wedding (he just finished his seventh batch of wedding brew). For a long time, I’d wanted to try making wine, but the whole process was really daunting. Would I have to ship in grapes, stomp them with my feet and let them age in oak barrels?

I looked into the process, talked to some people at the local wine/brew stores and realized I could make a high-quality wine for about the same cost of a bunch of “Three-Buck-Chuck.”

The process is actually pretty fool-proof IF you follow the instructions provided with the wine ingredient kit. There are a few places in the Twin Cities where you can find everything you’ll need to make wine from beginning to end. Northern Brewer is in St. Paul and Brew & Grow is in Spring Lake Park.

A basic wine-making kit costs $100 and includes all of the supplies you’ll need, minus the bottles and corks. We didn’t have to buy this kit, because we already had a beer-making kit, which includes many of the necessary supplies. We only had to supplement the beer-making kit with a few items.

Here’s a breadkdown of the estimated cost-savings:
Supplies (tools, cleaners and sanitizers, and corks) = $65
Recycled bottles = free
Wine ingredient kits = $225 for three kits

Total = $290

Each wine ingredient kit (which includes a juice concentrate, not grapes) costs between $55 and $165. Each kit makes 6 gallons of wine, or 30 bottles.

We made 90 bottles of wine for $290, or $3.22 per bottle. It was a lot of work, but totally worth it and it saved us a ton of money. If you are planning to make wine for your own wedding, start early. The earlier the better. We started the process about six months ago.

So readers, what lengths have you gone to save money for your wedding (or any other big event) and was it worth it? Later today, I have a story to share about how trying to be thrifty, or shall I say … cheap, backfired BIG TIME. And it has to do with my wedding dress.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 12:43 pm and is filed under guest bloggers, saving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.