The rewards and frustrations of home winemaking

Tag archive: blending

Blending Trials for Three Pelicans Blend

I’ve been planning to make a blend similar to Duckhorn’s “Paraduxx” for a while; their blend is a combination of Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot.  I was planning to substitute my 2009 Primitivo for the zinfandel, but in a previous blending trial the primitivo just overwhelmed all of the other varietals and any blend was […]

2011 Syrah Tasting Party #2

My 2011 Hands-on Harvest class met again last night to check out the progress on our 2011 Live Oak Vineyard Fallbrook syrahs. Details on fermentation and previous tasting notes are in prior blog posts.  Here are our tasting notes: Batch #1 — No additional oak was added after the first racking. Peppery aromas and very peppery, […]

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 […]

Barrel Wines Bottling Day!

We’ve been trying to get organized to bottle this wine for a while now, and we finally set a day and got it done.  I brought my portion of the wine home in carboys and a few miscellaneous bottles.  Dave and Josh wanted theirs bottled, so that’s what we did.  Dave did a few blending […]

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 […]