By Bloomberg Rankings and Nikhil Hutheesing
Bernie Rooney, owner of Oak Barrel Winecraft in Berkeley, Calif., says you can make a bottle of wine for about $5 or less once you have the equipment. That’s not why people go to the trouble, though. Instead, he says, home winemakers do it to enjoy the journey — from picking the grapes to drinking the wine a year or more later. “If you collect trains, people think you’re strange,” says Paul Taybi, a home winemaker in El Cerrito, Calif. “If you make wine, you get invited to a lot of parties.” In the end, your creation may remind you of Two-Buck Chuck (the bargain producer officially known as Charles Shaw), or a 1998 Chateau Mouton Rothschild –for those who have already drunk a good quantity of wine.
