The rewards and frustrations of home winemaking

Our May SDAWS meeting was held at Milagro Farm today.  Jim Hart hosted us and gave us a tour of the vineyards and told us about his recent wine releases.  He is winemaker for Milagro Farm Vineyard & Winery and also at Hart Winery in Temecula.  Milagro Farm Vineyard & Winery is in the Ramona [...]

Although I *said* I would give the syrah a few more weeks to finish MLF, it really doesn’t seem realistic that it would get going if malic acid levels have not dropped at all after 4 weeks.  I might actually be risking something bad happening in the wine in the meantime.  I posted this problem [...]

It’s been about 4 weeks since I added fresh malolactic bacteria to the syrah to try to get MLF going again.  I’ve been stirring it once or twice a week and keeping a heat pad on it overnight and in the cool parts of the daytime to keep the temperature between 70 – 80∘F.  I [...]

I checked in on the wines in the shower to make sure the airlocks weren’t contaminated or dried out, and saw another white layer on our 6-gallon carboy of merlot.  This was the first time I saw this white layer in this container, I found it previously on a smaller bottle of this merlot as [...]

I went out to help my friend Ray put posts in for his new vineyard at Highland Valley.  It was a great day, although we had Santa Ana winds.  That means nice warm, clear weather, and it also means strong gusts of wind up to 35 mph.  There were a few times we had to [...]

I found a listing for a used crusher/destemmer online, and we went and picked it up today!  Now we’re really ready for harvest season this year!

Since our syrah never finished malolactic fermentation, and since the free SO2 is below 10 ppm, I decided to try to restart the MLF with some fresh bacteria.  I set up 200 mL of filtered water with some acti-ML nutrient and added 2 grams of dry “Bacchus” MLB.  While that was incubating, I rechecked the [...]

I’ve been meaning to set up a free SO2 aeration/oxidation (A/O) system for a while to test our wines. I’ve mentioned before that the “quick tests” are difficult to read (especially for red wines, since it relies on a color change in the purple range) and are notoriously inaccurate.  From the information I could find, [...]

Since we were talking about our barrel wines while pruning yesterday, I wanted to check the progress of the 2008 merlot.  It wasn’t as clear as I wanted when I bottled it, and so I wanted to check if it was OK, or if I needed to open them all and let the solids settle [...]

Most of the east coast is blanketed in snow today.  Meanwhile, we finally got our southern California sunshine back — just in time to prune the syrah vines at Live Oak Vineyard. Mike Hoffman gave us a short tutorial on pruning for his vineyard; he already cut off the bulk of the canes, so we [...]