We visited Fallbrook Winery yesterday with some of our friends. It has been unusually cold and dreary around San Diego, but the sun eventually came out later in our tour. We were greeted by Vernon Kindred, one of the winemakers at Fallbrook. He walked us through some of the vineyards while describing the growing season [...]
Tag archive: grapes
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 [...]
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 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 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 [...]
I discovered that one of the 4-liter bottles of merlot has a funky white layer similar to the one I found on the rescued petite sirah. I hope I can remedy this one better, since the infection came back in the petite sirah after racking. Before racking I dipped cotton swabs in a Kmeta solution [...]
I got an email from Dave today, he and Paul checked out the merlot and petite sirah on Friday. Since this is our second year in the barrel, neither wine is very oaky yet. By this time last year the wine in the barrels had much more oak. The petite sirah is a little more [...]
Another full day of wine racking and shuffling! Dave sent me an email that the merlot barrel needed to be topped, so first I racked off the smaller bottles of merlot and took 2 cleared bottles to the office winery to top off the barrel. I thought I had enough to top off and leave [...]