A new venture. This week we’re making wine. We’re cheating slightly, as we’re using a kit, which yields 30 bottles for £19, so about 63p a pop. Will it be undrinkable? Who knows. I suspect not, but at that price we shall see.

It’s much quicker than making beer, as despite the fact that most home-brewed wines should be proved in the bottle for six months to year before drinking, this kit assures us that our cellar will be fully-stocked and ready for drinking in just seven days. An impressive claim indeed. If you can leave it for a further three months, it’ll continue to improve, but one of the additives is a maturing ingredient that forces the issue while it’s still in the fermenter, leaving you with over 20 litres of Chardonnay within a week.

The kit consists of all the necessary chemicals and additives. All you have to supply is water and sugar, a vat for brewing, an air lock and the bottles.

It’s ideal for wine-making first-timers. The kit itself consists of seven sachets of additives and a bottle of concentrate, which smells like Ribena. You start by dissolving 4kg of sugar in five litres of boiling water in the fermenter, and stirring until the water clears. It’s then that you realise how bad for you wine actually is.

You top up your fermenting barrel to the 22.7 litre point with cold water then stir in the concentrate, yeast and wood chips, which really are little wood shavings that presumably make it taste like it was conditioned in a barrel. Snap on the lid and the airlock, which you half-fill with water so it can release the pressure without letting in the outside air, and put it out of the way somewhere for six days to brew.

That’ll take us to Saturday morning by my reckoning, at which point we test its gravity, add the remaining ingredients, siphon it off and bottle it, bringing out the corking gun again.

All very exciting. Once it’s done we’ll be turning our attention back to the beer. We’re planning on a Norfolk brew this year, and if we get cracking in the first half of this month it should be just about ready for drinking by Christmas.

We’ll report back on the wine later in the week. Cross your fingers.