Grow your own ... wine

Making your own wine can be an involved, messy affair. 

Just ask Lucy.

But one Dutch designer turns wine-making into a work of art — something stylish enough to display in your home. 

Sabine Marcelis' wine-making kit comes with a pair of glass vessels, a brass stand, tubing, testing and corking supplies.

It's like a chemistry set for adults.

Pots for every occasion

There are some pots that I've owned for years.

I buy them out of necessity — when I've picked up a plant and don't have anything on hand that I can recycle at the moment, many of those are just blah pots because I'm in a hurry to get the plant potted and situated in its place on my patio.

I buy them because I just like the pot and don't have a particular plant tagged to call it home.
 


Sometimes I buy the container not knowing exactly what I'm going to use it for, plants or otherwise.
 


That's how it was with this Hungarian baby bath.

I originally thought I would put it in my garden with my birdhouses and bottle trees. Maybe I would fill it with ice and drinks when I had company since it has a convenient drain for the ice that melts.


But I've ended up using it as a seasonal plant container.
 
It sits on my patio and right now — I have these great ferns in it.



Once it gets cold, I'll have to move the ferns inside, but the bathtub will stay.
 
In October, I'll put some yellow or white mums out to welcome the trick-or-treaters.
 
In the winter, I fill it with pansies.
 
If you use big container plants, you can just drop them right in and lift them right out when you're ready for something different.
 


If I get tired of changing the plants out, I still have the option to ditch the plants and fill it with ice and drinks  or —
 

cover it and use it as a serving table or —


just sit it in the garden with the bird houses and bottle trees. 
 


"He hits from both sides of the plate," Yogi Berra once said. "He’s amphibious."
 


That's the way some containers are — amphibious.

An arcade in the garden

Gardening can sometimes feel like a game. 

It takes skill, effort and a time commitment — watching a plant grow, knowing that you've successfully balanced all of nature's variables, feels like a victory. Kind of like hitting the 3x multiplier on a pinball machine. 

Remember pinball? 

Gottlieb made the King Kool pinball
machine in the 1970s.

Back in a time before each child had a handheld game system, cellphone or iPad in his hand, kids used to pack arcades to spend some quality time with giant light-up machines, playing against their friends or  just against the machine to get the highest score. 

My favorite game was King Kool. The psychedelic Medieval theme was, well, cool. I could spend hours in a dark arcade, watching the flippers fling the ball across the backglass, the board lighting up as my score soared higher. A game of skill! the board exclaimed. Skill, indeed. 

These days, my skills are more natural. I've traded my hours inside for some quality time outdoors, but I can still spend hours in a dark place, since many of my favorite plants grow best in the shade. 

Nowadays, there's a new king of cool in my life — the king kong coleus. 

King kong coleus likes the shade,
similar to the cool environment of an arcade. 

The Kong rose coleus prefers shade or morning sun that lasts only a few hours and is not as hot as the afternoon sun. In time, they can grow big enough to provide their own shade. 

Now that I'm older, I get more enjoyment from the real life game of gardening. Seeing the results of my hard work in a colorful, healthy garden is a much better reward than bragging rights. And  now I'm old enough to drink wine to celebrate my victories. 

Adult juice boxes — straws optional

Enjoying a glass of wine can be a relaxing, quiet experience. 

But what about when your sister's 2-year-old is wobbling through the den, making a beeline toward your glass of wine?

More convenient packaging for your glass of wine can be helpful in a variety of situations — if you're going to the beach, a sporting event or somewhere that steady footing and a stable, solid surface isn't guaranteed, you need your wine to be in a portable container. 

The Wine Cube is available at Target for just such occasions. 

Cooler than traditional box wines? Check — and much easier to transport.

Cooler than Beatle Juice? Maybe not, but pretty darn close.

Cooler than the wine handbag? Depends — I think men would prefer that option when they've been abandoned in the women's clothing section while their wives are in the dressing room.

I think everyone would prefer this option when they're packing for a trip or hanging out in the backyard playing washers or horseshoes.

The wine headache

During my morning newspaper reading, I came across a story about a vintner that destroyed thousands of gallons of wine because of poor sales in the United States.

The Wall Street Journal reported in its Monday edition that Australian maker Treasury Wine Estates Ltd. had to destroy $145 million worth of wine that was past its prime.

They poured out what?

The first thing that popped into my mind when I read this was John Belushi kicking a car in the parking lot of the Delta frat house as Dean Wormer’s henchmen empty the contents of the house and drop a case of Jack Daniels, breaking all the whiskey bottles.

But in this case they’re breaking more than 45 million bottles —  aaaaggghhhhh!

Is this really necessary? Think of all the thirsty people in the world.

There are day-old bakery shelves – where are the 10 year old wine bins?

Mark the price down to cost and let me take my chances – I’ll even sign a waiver if they want me to.

They should partner with Harry and David and get a package deal going with cheese, crackers and deli meats nearing expiration.

Wineries have marketing people, don’t they?

Maybe they need to hire some new ones before the next 45 million bottle breakdown occurs.

More money, more wine: Alternative economic indicators

This week, The Wall Street Journal talked with Ray Isle, executive wine editor at Food and Wine magazine, about the economic state of the wine industry.

"People always drink," Isle says. "But they adjust what they're going to spend based on the economy."

As the economy continues to recover from the Great Recession, wine tastes evolve. People are spending more on wine — the $10-$20 a bottle segment of the market saw an increase of 8.2 percent in the last year (April 2011-April 2012, the latest figures available). The $20+ a bottle segment increased by 17 percent.

But who is buying $20 wine?

In general, wine purchasing skews toward the older, wealthier segment of the population. Indeed, Isle says, baby boomers are the biggest consumers of wine. They have disposable income and a taste for it.

But to account for the growth, we can look (at least in part) to the millennials. This generation is getting into wine, which improved sales.

Martin Truex Jr. raises a glass of wine after winning the NASCAR Sprint Cup series auto race June 23 in Sonoma, Calif. Millennials like Truex, born in 1980, have gotten into wine, accounting for part of the industry's growth. (Photo by Eric Risberg / The Associated Press)

The most popular category is still in the $6 a bottle zone. California's top five producers — Kendall Jackson, Cupcake, Menage a Trois, Bogle and Clos du Bois — make wines in this price range and are enormously popular.

Also enormously popular among the top five American distributors? Buying in bulk from around the world, especially South America. It's common for these large companies to ship in foreign wine, like a Malbec from Argentina, and bottle it.

Watch The Wall Street Journal video here.

Re-purposing: Part Deux

What do you do with your empty bottles?

You can put them in the recycle bin on the curb for pick-up — they'll put them to good use and it's better than contributing them to the local landfill.

But what will the neighbors think? 

I read a story recently about concerned wine drinkers who would drive around the neighborhood and "share" their empties with their neighbors' recycle bins after dark to avoid potential suspicions about their imbibing patterns. 

Don't waste your gas — there are many other, more practical ways to use those empties.

Bottle trees are on option. 

I have some that have a variety of bottle types planted on them.

I've made some bottle bushes by jamming pieces of rebar in the ground and planting different bottles on each rebar stem.

Some bottle trees hang like a plant from a beam outside.

My favorite bottle tree is a metal arch.

I picked it up at a flea market and I've covered it with blue and green bottles.

Remember — your plants get thirsty, too.

Poke a hole in a cork, fill one of your empties with with water, then return the cork to the bottle and place the bottle cork first into one of your plants. 

It's both decorative and useful. Thirsty plants will appreciate the time-release refreshment.

But at some point, you'll have to explain to your neighbors why your plants drink so much.