A few weeks ago I was on Twitter (shocker, right?) and I noticed a Tweet from the Crushpad folks. I’ve been to Crushpad once and I’m making sparkling wine there this year, so I follow them pretty closely. The Tweet said to ReTweet it for a chance to win a FuseBox. I didn’t know what a FuseBox was, but I ReTweeted it anyway. A couple days later I got a message from Crushpad telling me I’d won and the FuseBox would ship in a few weeks.
At that point, I decided to look up and see what a FuseBox was. Turns out, it’s a kit that Crushpad sells with components to blend your own wine. You get Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petite Verdot, and Cabernet Franc. Also in the box is everything you need to measure, blend, and record your wine creations! Included are blending sheets, pipettes, a beaker, recipes….We had a free weekend, so Matt and I got to work playing mad scientist and blending our own creation.
We worked our way through some of the “recipes” provided that included the blends of some famous wines (though obviously made from different fruit/vintages!) and then got down to business trying to come up with our own. After trial and error, consisting a lot of “This tastes hollow in the middle” or “This is too tannic” we finally settled on our blend. (One of our blends was pretty bad…we tried to tone down the Cabernet Sauvignon too much and it was a disaster!)
Now comes the really cool part. After you create your perfect blend, Crushpad will make your wine for you and bottle it! You can purchase as little as one case. I haven’t gotten around to that part yet, but I do intend to. We think we’re going to call it “Two Front Yards Red” after our 6 month long struggle with our fence and the county! Our final blend consisted of 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Cabernet Franc, 14% Merlot, and 6% Petite Verdot.
Crushpad is now offering to let charities and not for profits use the FuseBox to create wines to raise money for their organizations. It’s no money up front for the organization and I understand that Crushpad will be setting up “storefronts” on its website to allow folks to purchase wines from participating organizations.
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