Give a man a bottle of wine, and he'll drink for a day—teach a man to make a bottle of wine, and he'll always have something to crawl into after a bad day at the alpaca races. Bet on winsome wine with today's Groupon: $50 gets you a winemaking experience from Vintage One Wines (a $90 value).
Vintage One puts the power of winemaking into the hands of Toronto's toasters. With this offer, clients will have the opportunity to guide an Argentinean Malbec or Chilean Chardonnay into flavourful fruition. The process begins with a tour of Vintage One's 10,000-square-foot facility, followed by a one-on-one consultation with a Vintage One winemaker. From there, Vintage One clients can use a monthly production calendar to be as hands-on as they like throughout the entire two-month winemaking process, including fermentation, filtration, and stabilization, or they can just let the wine take its own course while they spend the interim traversing the globe on a falcon-guided vision quest. Once the wine is ready, Vintage One customers will choose a bottle and cork (an additional fee of about $1.25 a bottle, for a total of around $15) and may even opt to custom design a label (also for an additional fee) for the concoction, perhaps building off the imagery of their fire-breathing-eagle neck tattoos.
The end result of this winding winemaking saga is a case containing 12 bottles of your very own wine. While law prohibits you from turning around and selling the wine, it doesn't prohibit you from using the wine to fuel early morning sonnet-composing sessions or your next marathon race. So validate your childhood dreams of being a vintner and join Vintage One's winemaking program.