It Pays To Have Friends Associated With A Winemaking Class

We have a couple of friends associated with a winemaking class on campus. One of them works in the lab in which students learn to make wine and the other one took the class (I think) last semester. Interestingly, it’s illegal to consume alcohol on campus, but legal to make it (may be, they make it but never taste it or something). Anyways, so these friends were helping their professor clean up the lab and decided to get rid of dozens of bottles of wine that had stocked up after the last winemaking class (it must have been sometime during the last year). Me and my wife *happened* to be in the vicinity and our friends were happy to dump three bottles of red wine into our backpacks.

We were a bit hesitant about how this free wine (made by students) would taste. However, I experimented with one of the bottles yesterday and found it to be extremely good (may be that one was made by students who got an A in the class). Seriously, I would have paid $12+ for this wine in a store. Assuming that the remaining bottles are equally good, we just got about $36+ worth of wine for free by just being at the right place, at the right time (accidentally).

In the past we have heard numerous accounts of students getting free lunches/snacks by the virtue of their friends working in on-campus cafeterias…but we never heard of anyone getting free wine before this.

Btw, just to satisfy my curiosity, I checked online for some winemaking procedures and stumbled on this. It’s a pretty detailed, step-by-step, guide to making your own wine at home. I am certain that it would be extremely frugal to make your wine this way…but, I am also very sure that the whole winemaking-at-home thing will not be easy (those students must have done a really good job). If you want to be an oenophile for cheap, consider investing in a winemaking class or read this article at Get Rich Slowly.