The rewards and frustrations of home winemaking

Monthly archive: 07 2009

Bottling Party

Our friend invited us over to “help” him bottle his 2 barrels of wine.  We spent most of the time drinking barrel samples, the bottling went pretty quickly.  We did have a problem at the end where the corks were coming back out of the bottles.  I’m still not sure why this started happening, but […]

Cellar Craft Lodi Old Vine Zin

I finished bottling the “Bahia Belle” blend and Merlot B (“Embarcadero” merlot) today.  Then I finally started another “easy drinker” red kit that I’ve been excited about, a Cellar Craft Lodi Old Zinfandel.  I wanted a good, easy house zin to have around for grilling and whatnot, so I did a lot of research on […]

Oi That’s a LOT of Wine!

My goal was to fill all of these bottles today.  It turned out I filled over half, but decided to wait to fill the rest next weekend.  Why do today what you can do a week from now, eh? I did at least put together all of the blends.  ‘Fiesta Islad Cab’ will be mainly […]

Tasting/Blending Party

I had some friends over last night to taste the cabernet sauvignon and 3 merlots made from fresh grapes.  We first by tasted each individually, starting with the cab and then the barrel merlot, merlot A, and merlot B.  It was very interesting how much all of the wines have changed even since my last […]