|| Wine || It all started with a Groupon...

So, we found a Groupon one day for The Wine Butler. $69 for 28 bottles of red wine? YES PLEASE!

We got the "South African Cabernet Sauvignon"... or more appropriately as we call it now, grape juice with alcohol in it.

At the time of bottling, we got a huge discount coupon for coming back to create another batch. We knew that our new cheap-o $69 alcoholic grape juice wine wasn't going to be good wine by any means, but we did enjoy a batch we made at a previous wine company and wanted to re-stock.  So, we asked the owner/whoever it was what their most popular wine was, that their customers had good reviews about and kept coming back for. He said definitely the Amarone from their Exceptional Wines selection. So, we bought it and saved $100 off the $209 regular price.

We went back to bottle it the other day and... guess what...while it's darker in colour than our first batch, it tastes EXACTLY the same as the Groupon wine. I was so disappointed.

We do drink a lot of wine. LOL I hate to say it but we've almost become semi wine snobs (we've started to never be satisfied with wine under the $15-$25 price range)... and I hate those people! Not really, but it's kind of embarrassing to be so picky :) But this is one reason why we can tell that this is not a good wine (yet) nor situation to be in... we now have 50 bottles of homemade wine in storage that we can't even consider giving away right now because we dislike it that much!

The Wine Butler people strongly suggested, and swear by, 'aging' this wine. I kind of believe them, as we have let our first batch age a bit (since November) and the taste has slightly changed... it's less ripe, less fruity, but still close to how it was when it was first bottled. And a very light wine with little to no tannins and extremely sweet. However, since I swear this 'Amarone' tastes exactly the same... how can aging it make it taste so drastically different? It literally needs to transform to a completely different taste altogether for me to be convinced that they didn't just give us the cheap Groupon wine and call it Amarone.

I really hope it does change in flavour... I had good faith in this wine and really wanted to find an affordable homemade wine company that made wine that is at least drinkable/enjoyable and doesn't taste like homemade wine every time. So far I am not so impressed.

Does anyone have any feedback or tips on this? We are going to age the Amarone for at least 3 or 4 months before we taste it again. I will provide my next review at that time!

Does aging this kind of wine really help that much? How long are you really able to store it for?

Comments would be greatly appreciated!