I'll second what PolishWinePrincess said - doing a kit while you wait for harvest of your own produce is a good "practice" and you get something drinkable sooner to appreciate your own handiwork with.
We grow our own grapes - concord type grapes - and have our own supply of wild chokecherry trees, crabapple, raspberry (can't seem to collect enough for wine, they disappear between the garden or forest and the house somehow), blueberries in a good year (which there hasn't been for about a decade) and a number of other wine-able items (pea pods and oak leaves for example
- just kidding - yes you can make wine from them but no I don't)
The problem with some fruit wines is, they can take a while to age into "good" wine - and when I get despondent over the not-quite-good/not-quite-ready wines, a kit wine that is pretty dummy proof is nice to have to cry into my glass over
while I tinker and work on fixing up my experiments.
If ALL I had to drink was my Tomato Wine or my Ancient Orange Mead (neither of which is what I will call enjoyable just quite yet), I would be at the bottle shop kicking myself over all the wine making equipment I bought for naught...
I think of the kit wine as a form of insurance, or a vaccine to keep me from succumbing to retail-wine-shopping. That and, you can't make a good cabernet or sauvignon blanc from watermelons.
By the way - have you seen these links:
http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/watermel.asp
http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques11.asp
...recipes and advise regarding watermellon wines
We grow our own grapes - concord type grapes - and have our own supply of wild chokecherry trees, crabapple, raspberry (can't seem to collect enough for wine, they disappear between the garden or forest and the house somehow), blueberries in a good year (which there hasn't been for about a decade) and a number of other wine-able items (pea pods and oak leaves for example
The problem with some fruit wines is, they can take a while to age into "good" wine - and when I get despondent over the not-quite-good/not-quite-ready wines, a kit wine that is pretty dummy proof is nice to have to cry into my glass over
If ALL I had to drink was my Tomato Wine or my Ancient Orange Mead (neither of which is what I will call enjoyable just quite yet), I would be at the bottle shop kicking myself over all the wine making equipment I bought for naught...
I think of the kit wine as a form of insurance, or a vaccine to keep me from succumbing to retail-wine-shopping. That and, you can't make a good cabernet or sauvignon blanc from watermelons.
By the way - have you seen these links:
http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/watermel.asp
http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques11.asp
...recipes and advise regarding watermellon wines