Winemaking Experience
Our winemaking experience on Long Island starts with crushing grapes with your hands. The smell hits you first–fruity, earthy, alive. At wineUdesign in Hicksville, you'll make real wine from scratch. No shortcuts, no concentrates.
Just grapes from California and Chile, time, and your hands doing the actual work. By the time you're bottling ten months later, you won't just have 240 bottles. You'll understand winemaking.
Make Wine With Friends on Long Island
You start by choosing grape varieties. California Cabernet? Chilean Carmenere? Italian Sangiovese? Your call. Then you crush and press them with your crew.
One week later, you're back. Push the fermented mix through our press into your private barrel. This is where it ages for 6-8 months, tucked away in our barrel room at 55-60 degrees (bring a jacket when you visit for tastings).
Eventually, you'll rack the wine and taste it to check progress. The final visit? Bottling day. Filter, fill, cork, seal. You'll even design your own labels.
Ten months from crush to bottle. By the end, you've got 240 bottles to share. Or sell–plenty of our winemakers do exactly that.
How It Works
This works best with friends. Six to twelve people splitting the cost and the wine at the end. You'll make four visits to our Hicksville facility over 8-10 months, each building on the last.
Crush grapes in fall. Press them a week later. Taste from your barrel in spring (this is when people get hooked). Bottle in summer with labels you designed.
By the end? 240 bottles of wine you actually made, not watched someone else make. And knowledge that most wine drinkers never get–what fermentation smells like, why oak matters, how tannins work.
Grape Crushing
Forget stomping grapes with your feet (that's mostly a movie thing). You'll crush them through our de-stemmer–grapes from California, Chile, Italy–to kick off fermentation.
This is where your wine journey starts. Grapes becoming juice becoming something you'll be proud to pour at dinner parties.
Meet the Press
Week later, you're pushing fermented mix through our press. This squeezes the juice away from skins and seeds. That liquid goes into your private barrel for 6-8 months.
The smell at this stage? Incredible. Fruity, alive, unmistakably wine in the making. People always ask to smell it twice.
Bottle & Label
Final visit. Filter, fill, cork, seal. You'll walk out with 240 bottles of wine bearing labels you designed.
Now celebrate. Share with family. Gift to friends. Sell at your cousin's wedding if you want (seriously, we've seen it). Some of our winemakers turn their barrels into side businesses, selling bottles at events and through social networks. Your wine, your call.
Winemaking Classes
After finishing our program, you'll know enough to make wine at home. Restock your signature vintage whenever the mood strikes. Or if you don't own fermenting tanks (and who does?), just come back and repeat the process with us. Your second vintage will taste even better than your first.
Classes only run during crushing seasons–September to October and April to May. These sessions fill fast because there's only so much grape-crushing you can do in a year.
Don't wait. Harvest doesn't care about your schedule. Enroll now before spots disappear.
Why Choose wineUdesign?
We think wine should be clean and community-driven. Every wine here gets barrel-aged for at least 10 months without chemical shortcuts. That means every sip reflects actual craft, not factory efficiency.
Want to take this further? We ship bottles to 41 states. Many barrel winemakers create extra bottles to sell through their networks–weddings, corporate gifts, friend discounts. Your wine, your business model.
