A Kit That Turns Homemade Wine Into Beautiful Art
Sabine Marcelis’s House Wine kit is pretty enough to throw on display.
Search the web for home wine-making supplies, and you’ll be greeted by so many plastic buckets and airlocks and hoses, you’ll feel like you just stumbled onto a construction site. DIY vinification is a complex (and unsightly) affair. But it doesn’t have to be that way, as Dutch design student Sabine Marcelis shows.
Marcelis has created a simple wine-making kit that also happens to be pretty enough to throw on display in your living room. The kit comes with a pair of glass vessels, a brass stand, tubing, testing and corking supplies, and an oak base that doubles as a drawer for storing the assorted fittings.
To start the fermentation process, you pour a fruit mixture into one of the glass vessels and seal it with a cork. When the liquid’s ready to be siphoned, it’s squeezed through a tube, using the force of gravity, into a wine bottle on the oak base below. As Marcelis tells it, that eliminates a rather awkward step in the process: Typically, people have to suck on the tube to get the wine flowing.
Marcelis believes that the contraption’s beauty adds to its usability: Because it can figure prominently in a living space, people will spend more time checking on their elixir--and adding ingredients and nutrients as needed--than they would if it were hidden in the garage.
House Wine is on display at the graduation show of the Design Academy Eindhoven through October 30. More here.
[Images courtesy of Sabine Marcelis]
