July 22, 2025 · 5 min read

The case for making wine you actually want to drink

Don't make a varietal because it's impressive. Make the one you'd open on a Tuesday.

An open bottle of homemade red wine and a half-full glass on a worn kitchen counter on a quiet weeknight.

There's a thing that happens to new winemakers about three batches in. You start scrolling. You start reading. You discover Barolo and Amarone and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and you think, well, if I'm going to do this, I might as well do it.

Then six months later you're staring at twenty-eight bottles of something extremely correct that nobody, including you, particularly wants to open on a Wednesday.

The varietal nobody asked you to make

We've made the impressive ones. We've made the ones the forum kids said you have to make. Some of them were genuinely good. Most of them sat. Because the truth is, the impressive bottle is for a moment, and most of life isn't moments. Most of life is a Tuesday with leftover pasta.

A homemade wine bottle with a blue painters tape label that reads TUESDAY RED, sitting next to an open paperback.

“Make the wine that fits the night you actually have, not the night you keep meaning to throw.”

— Todd

How we pick now

These days, before we order a kit, we ask one question: would we open this on a regular Tuesday, with whatever's in the fridge, no occasion, no audience? If the answer is no, we don't make it. Not because it's bad — because it'll sit, and wine that sits is just expensive glass.

Russ has a Cab he keeps in rotation that costs us about four bucks a bottle and pairs with literally everything, including takeout. That's the bar now. Pairs with takeout.

A hand pouring red wine into a small juice glass at a casual dinner table.

If you're picking your next batch, skip the section of the catalog that has the words "complex" and "award-winning." Go straight to the one that says "easy drinking, ready in 4–6 weeks." That's the one you'll actually drink.