Toast Your Mother

If your mother likes good vino, consider making one specially for her this Mother’s Day with Napa Cabernet Fusebox ($79.99), a kit made by Crushpad, San Francisco’s Community Winery. It contains blending equipment, four wines from highly rated Spectator vineyards in the Napa Valley and instructions on how to blend them to create your very own, made-just-for-mom varietals. She’ll be so proud.

Or let her try her hand at it. If she’s a natural she can explore Crushpad’s do-it-yourself option for creating wine from scratch. The Crushpad team provides online tools that allow anyone from around the globe to make wine and spend as much or as little time as they want at the vineyard. They start by helping you create a winemaking plan with more than 30 detailed specifications, like barrel type and fermentation technique. Then you choose grapes from 50 acclaimed vineyards in California and Bordeaux. You can be hands-on at the winery by sorting, de-stemming, crushing, fermenting and pressing your wine into barrels, or simply check the status of your wine through Crushnet, a real-time website for managing the entire winemaking process. The cost to create 25 cases ranges from $5,700 to $10,900 (or about $19 to $36 per bottle). Then you can create your own label and also sell your brand through Crushpad.—Denise Shoukas

Denise Shoukas is a regular foodspring.com contributor and is the author of foodspring’s food forager blog.

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