I got an email today from Mike Hoffman that the syrah started veraison and harvest should be around the first week of September. Hopefully there won’t be a last-minute heat wave like last year, which raisined a lot of the grapes before we could pick them for wine. I’ll need to start thinking about what [...]
Tag archive: bottling
Today was a game of wine shuffling. My hubby commented I’m playing Towers of Hanoi with the wines. Here’s what I have to do: I have 2 carboys of the syrah, and Paul needs those carboys back, so I need to move them into 5-gallon better bottles. The only 5-gallon better bottles I have are [...]
It’s finally time to bottle the barolo that has been bulk aging since March. I wanted to avoid bottling any of the goop that has settled out at the bottom, so I racked off the clear wine into a bucket. I noticed a white film at the top similar to what I saw a few [...]
It is kinda cool to look up and see jets flying in formations overhead while you’re bottling your wine. We all got together to bottle the rest of the merlot hanging out in the barrel, and it happened to be the day of the Miramar Air Show. We got our bottling line set up outside [...]
Time to get the syrah started. I met Dave at the office, and he set up the “server room winery” with plastic sheeting while I revved up the yeast. I heated up some water and dissolved in go-ferm, then added ICV-D254 yeast and let it wake up for about 15 minutes. Then I added some [...]
I started on the immense task of actually putting foil capsules and labels on all of the barrel wines I bottled a few weeks ago. Occasionally some of the bottles I recycle have super-fat necks, and so instead of the heat capsules sliding nicely over the neck, I have to pull them on until they’re [...]
Today I bottled 30 bottles each of a cabernet sauvignon kit (for Dave) and chianti (for me). As I was putting labels on the chianti, I noticed one cork with wine seeping out of the top. I’ve never had this happen before. I yanked that one out, and wine spewed out – we had overfilled [...]
Time to bottle the sauvignon blanc that had the battonage treatment. That added another 6 weeks of waiting to the kit, I’m very curious how this wine will compare to the “untreated” kit. I will let these bottles wait for about 3 months before doing a side-by-side, to give it as much of a fair [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]