The trick to making a good gift of homemade wine lies in seeing it objectively and seeing it the way other people do (not necessarily the same thing!). After doting over the yeast, balancing the must till it’s just so, and (im)patiently aging, you might have a hard time tasting your wine with a critical palate. I know I do.

How to tell if your homemade mead or wine is good enough

One way to get an objective look at your own wine or mead is to compare it against a known quantity in a blind tasting. Sometimes it’s pretty easy to decide what to compare it against. You want to know how good your homemade Chardonnay is? Taste it blind against a good commercial Chardonnay. It’s tougher when you want to test something more obscure.

Commercial meads are available, but I’ve been unimpressed by the ones I’ve tried. You could test your own mead against them. It might be better, though, to think about what food would pair well with it and test it against a good commercial wine that also goes with that food. For example, I served aged dry rhubarb wine with ham at Thanksgiving, and it was terrific. So a dinner party with ham could become a tasting party for rhubarb wine (tested against Chardonnay maybe?). There are lot of questions you won’t be able to answer in an apples to oranges comparison like that, but you should be able to answer, which one would I rather drink with ham?

Competitions are also a good way to get objective feedback, even if the feedback is just a score. They can be less work than a tasting party, but a good tasting party will be a lot more fun.

A gift of wine will tell a story: Make it a good one

Ok, you’ve done your taste tests and it isn’t just you – you’ve really got a good homemade wine and you want to make a gift of it. Like commercial wine that you give away, your gift of wine will tell a story. The story can’t be all about you. If it’s, “look at me!” or “see what I can do!” you might as well give away pictures of yourself – even good ones won’t make good gifts. If you know someone who’s started or genuinely interested in making their own mead or wine, then one of your own would make a great gift. Someone who really likes a kind of wine that’s hard to get would love to get a good homemade version. Scoring well in a competition also makes a good story, and I’m sure you can think of others.

A great wine needs a great label

I’ve written about why it’s important to make a good label for homemade wine before, and everything I said goes double for gifts. Why would the recipient think there’s something special about it if you don’t think it’s worth the effort to make a good label? You might even make special labels for wine or mead that you give away. Use it to help tell the story – did it win a blue ribbon at your state fair? Put that on the label!

Have you had a good (or bad) experience with homemade wine as a gift? I’d love to hear about it.

Wine can make a great gift. You’ve got to pick a good one, of course, and it has to be a style that your victim loved one enjoys, but there is more to it than that. I have a new favorite wine. I bought two cases in the past few months (that’s a lot for me), and I know people who like this style of wine. But I won’t give any of it away because it would make a terrible gift.

Every gift tells a story

My current favorite wine is inexpensive. If you saw the label, you’d probably recognize it and the first thing that would come to mind is how little it costs. If that’s what they think when they open your gift, they’ll mean it when they say, “you shouldn’t have!” It won’t matter if it blows away other wines at it’s price point (it does) and it won’t matter if it beats many mid-priced wines (it does that too), it will just be the cheap gift. And no, you can’t make it up in volume by giving them a lot of it.


Buying a good wine that costs more isn’t really enough. If you want to make someone happy with your gift it should tell a story. What kind of story? Let’s look at Wine Spectator’s top 100 wines of 2009. You can make a lot of valid criticisms about lists like that, but none of that criticism will matter if you bought someone the Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Columbia Valley Reserve 2005. You wouldn’t just be giving them a very good wine, you’d be giving them Wine Spectator’s Number One Wine of 2009. Now that’s a great story! Unfortunately the wine is sold out and very difficult to come by, so most people won’t be able to use this as practical advice. On the other hand, if you can get some, then not only would it be Wine Spectator’s top choice, but it would be Sold Out And Really Hard To Get!

A good story can be personal

A while back, I set out to find the best Washington State Lemberger. I couldn’t survey the 650+ wineries in the state, but I did my homework. I visited wineries and wine shops and talked to the owners, employees, and customers. I did some online research. Finally I had three Lembergers that I wanted to try. I arranged a tasting party and one of my guests, Chef Ralph, brought a fourth. We tasted, we took notes, we disagreed, we ate, we had a great time.

In the end, the Lady of the House and I had a new favorite Lemberger and it would be the perfect gift for a red wine drinker on my list. Not just a good red wine, not just a good wine from Washington, but my top pick after looking for the best Washington State Lemberger.

One story does not work for everyone

Except Chef Ralph. Neither of us knew this until all the wines were tasted, all the notes were taken, and all the wines were ranked, but he ranked my favorite (and I ranked his) dead last. I don’t know what that says exactly (we have different tastes? the wines were very close?) but if I bought it for him the story would be “his last choice.”

I’ll be using experiences like that to pick wines for people I know, and next week I’ll talk about giving homemade wine as a gift (no, I didn’t forget about that!)