Patience is a virtue. This cliché probably applies to winemaking better than it does to any other activity. That doesn't mean that it'll be 5 years before you find out if a small oversight you made today ruined your whole batch. In fact, many kits recommend a 28 day process from start to finish. Once it's in the bottle, the wine can be aged for a month or two and then consumed. Once you have been making wine at home for a while, you will probably always have properly aged wine to bottle, properly aged wine to drink, and new wine to be made. When you're just starting out, though, it's tough to have patience. Luckily, you will have enough bottles of wine that you can drink some too early, some at the right time, and some after the wine's peak. It's one of the ways home winemakers come to understand the wine aging process better than "mere" wine lovers.