Todd & Russ, more or less

Todd and Russ have known each other since fifth grade. Bikes, basements, a regrettable garage band, two weddings each, kids, jobs, the whole thing. We are mid-50s now, which is the part of life where you finally start admitting which hobbies stuck.

Wine stuck.

Russ started first. He always does. He bought a kit, made a passable Merlot, called me, and said 'you have to come over for this.' I came over. The Merlot was, in fact, better than passable. I went home with a six-gallon carboy and a head full of bad ideas.

Russ also brews beer. I have not, despite his very enthusiastic recruitment efforts, gotten into the beer side. I respect it. I drink it when he hands it to me. I am not building a brew rig.

Long before I owned a carboy, I was reviewing wine. Since 2012, I've been writing up wine-of-the-month clubs at wineclubgroup.com with a longtime tasting partner — hundreds of shipments, thousands of bottles, and a lot of opinions about what "good for the price" actually means.

Reviewing wine and making wine are two completely different muscles. Tasting teaches you what you like and why. Making teaches you why it costs what it costs, and why a fourteen-dollar bottle that tastes like a thirty-dollar bottle is genuinely impressive. Both habits feed each other — and both end up in everything we write here.

Our first really good batch was a Cabernet. Thirty bottles, all unlabeled, all completely indistinguishable from any other dark bottle in any other basement. Russ grabbed a roll of blue painters tape and a sharpie and wrote BACKUP WINE on the first one as a joke.

We labeled all thirty that way. The name stuck. The bottles got handed out to friends. People asked for more. Now there is a website. The internet is a strange place.

Backup Wine is not a store. We do not sell anything ourselves. What we do is point you at the kits and supplies we actually use — the ones that worked for two guys in a garage who had no idea what they were doing — and tell you the truth about each one.

Click a Buy button and you will land on Amazon, Northern Brewer, MoreWine, or somewhere similar. Buy from whoever you like. Make wine. Label your bottles. Or don't, and join the club.