The awards ceremony for the San Diego County Fair Homemade Wine Competition was yesterday. I couldn’t make it because I had to run the shop, but my hubby went to enjoy the fun and bring home my awards. I submitted 3 wines, and they all won medals: the 2010 Winexpert limited edition Pacifica White won [...]
Tag archive: primitivo
Although this wine is pretty newly bottled, I couldn’t wait to give it a taste. We recently got a Vinturi wine aerator, so we’ve been tasting every wine with and without the vinturi treatment. This wine definitely benefited from the treatment. Without aearation, the primi has faint aroma of burnt rubber with roasted red fruits [...]
I have a few wines that are due for bottling, but I was waiting until I opened my shop because I needed corks, and it seemed to make sense that I should buy them from myself. So today I’m finally bottling my Amador county primitivo. I’ll bottle most of it as 100% varietal, but I’m [...]
My in-laws are visiting from Germany, and that seemed like a good reason to check the progress of all of the vintage 2009 wines in the shower. I pulled 100 mL samples from various carboys for a taste. We started with the Fallbrook syrah. This wine already has great aromas with big fruit and good [...]
We are planning to bottle the syrah soon, and I will also probably bottle the primitivo as well. The merlot and petite sirah in the barrels have not picked up enough oak for our tastes, so we’re going to leave them for another year. I realized I haven’t cleaned out the airlocks on my carboys [...]
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, [...]
The primitivo has been settling out since October, so it seemed like time to poke at it. I like to splash rack my wine that is bulk aging in carboys at least once to try to give it a little oxygenation while it’s hanging out. The primi has become wonderfully clear already, a lovely purple-ruby [...]
Lots to do this weekend! Of course, there were 2 trips to the office winery to punch down the newly pitched Petite Sirah. By the evening, the temp was up to 78 degrees (in an air conditioned room) and there were serious caps on all of the buckets. Then I had to deal with trying [...]
All of our wines are fermenting fast this year, the merlot was already at 0 brix by Friday. Dave retested all the cans Saturday morning after we had all gathered for pressing, and noticed that the hydrometer he had used was broken — there was juice inside of the hydrometer. But, luckily the juice was [...]
Yep, harvest season is in full swing. Our merlot from Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma arrived Tuesday. The plan was to do a 4-5 day cold soak, then pitch the yeast on Sunday — except it started spontaneously fermenting on Friday! Paul ran out and got the yeasts to pitch, ICV-D21 and BM4x4. Chris recommended [...]