The rewards and frustrations of home winemaking

Monthly archive: 04 2009

First Racking of Yakima Synergy and Starting Year-Old Kit

The SG on the Yakima Synergy is at 0.994, although it’s still bubbling away in there.  After racking, it’s not very pretty!  But, it’s early in the game, there’s still plenty of stirring ahead before it’s expected to clear. In the meantime, Dave bought a cabernet sauvignon kit last year, at the same time that […]

Time to Nix the MLF

I’m pretty sure the MLB is not viable anyway, but I don’t want to risk exploding wine bottles, either.  What we needed to do was treat our merlot with lysozyme.  Lysozyme is an enzyme that will lyse the bacterial walls, which definitely completely destroys any bacteria that might still be hanging around.  Chris Van Alyea […]

Muller-Thurgau Bottling

Time to bottle!  I racked about half of carboy, then filtered the rest with my gravity filter and combined the wine before bottling – I was too impatient to wait for it to clear over an extended bulk aging. I really need to get an inline filter for the enolmatic, the gravity filter added an […]

Starting Yakima Synergy Cellar Craft Reserve

This is my first Cellar Craft kit.  I’m looking forward to this one for several reasons.  I’ve read a lot of good things about Cellar Craft on winepress.us.  Also, the description of this white blend sounds beyond yummy;  it’s a blend of Marsanne and Roussanne from Yakima valley in Washington state, two lovely rhone whites.  […]

Bottling Christopher Cameron Wine

I had the opportunity to help out Chris Van Alyea bottling his Christopher Cameron 2007 “Lambert Bridge Vineyard” Petite Sirah and 2006 Costa Azul Sonoma County Red Blend. We bottled about 360 cases total, it was a long day, but a lot of fun!  It was really interesting to check out the fancy bottling line, […]

Stabilizing & Clearing Argentinian trio

The Argentinian Trio was a bit full after racking, so I took out about 550 mL before degassing.  I’m glad I did, there was a LOT of foam!  It was foamy for the first and second set of stirring, then I waited about half an hour an stirred again to try to really degas the […]