The Wine Cellar --
A Review of Regular Guys Wines
We began making wine in the fall of 1994. Since then we have learned a lot and had some great fun. The Regular Guys would like to give a special thanks to the Columbus Amateur Wine Makers Guild where we learned a great deal about the science and fun of wine making. We especially want to thank Guild member and friend Don Rings who gave us our initial instructions. By the way, most of what you see in the basic wine making instructions located on this site came from Don.
Below is a review of the wines we have produced so far.
St. George Cabernet Sauvignon 1994
This was our first wine. It was made from a concentrate. The result was a nice, but undistinguished dry red wine. The color was not as deep as one would like from a Cabernet, but still, it was fine to drink and a good start for our new hobby.
Chateau Koniglich Saufer 1994
Our first wine to win a prize. This red zinfandel was made from fresh juice from California. The name is from the German and means "Estate of the Royal Drunkard". This was a medium dry wine that we liked very much. In fact, in later years we put about half of our production in red zinfandel as it became our everyday table wine. In 1996 this wine was honored with 3rd place at the Amateur Wine Makers Guild annual festival in the Dry Red Vinefera catagory.
Darby Valley Cape Cod Cranberry 1994
This was our first effort in making wine direct from fruit. We bought cranberries when they were plentiful right after Thnksgiving. The resulting wine made a very nice addition to our Thanksgiving dinner the next year. The lesson we learned from this batch was that the cranberry wine made a lot more sediment than we expected. three rackings was not enough. The result was a wine that was not a clear as we would have liked and considerable sediment in the bottle so that it needed to be decanted before being served. The Darby Valley name is one we decided to hold over and use with almost all of our non-grape fruit wines.
