The oak trials were bottled about 2 months ago now, and I’m ready to do a tasting of the panel. My husband has agreed to help me out, since there are 7 different wines to taste. First is the unoaked Winexpert Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay: dry, but not crisp, with subtle hints of apple and pear. [...]
Tag archive: wine kit
I pulled out another bottle of my ‘La Jolla Caves’ Winexpert Crushendo “Montagnac Vieux Chateau d’Oc” red rhone blend to see if it is doing anything useful in the cellar. So far, this is one wine kit that has disappointed me all along, and I just don’t think this wine is going to come around. [...]
It is finally time to bottle the oak trials today! I am also bottling the 2009 Petite Sirah that I did egg white fining on, so I can compare it to the unfined wine side-by-side. The chardonnays all cleared out really nicely, which is great so I can bottle directly from the individual jugs — [...]
The oak trials continue! All wines were stabilized and cleared about a week ago. Today I’m racking them all, and the unoaked wine kit will be split into 1-gallon batches. I had just under 6 full gallons after racking, so I used the little bit left over to top the pre-fermentation oak batches. I realize [...]
I was inspired by Tim Vandergrift’s Hands-On oak trials at the Winemaker Magazine Conference in Santa Barbara to set up my own set of oak trials. I decided to just get a basic chardonnay kit, the Winexpert Vintners’ Reserve Chardonnay. This kit does come with a small pack of oak, but I pulled it out. [...]
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 [...]
We recently attended the Winemaker Magazine conference in Santa Barbara, California. It was a two-day conference loaded with seminars covering all aspects of winemaking — wine chemistry, wine kits, growing grapes, fermentation. We learned a lot of great information to add to our arsenal of winemaking techniques and met several home winemakers from around North [...]
I bottled the Cellar Craft limited edition ‘Chateau du Pays‘ today. I intended to bulk age this wine 6 to 8 months, but realized I was a carboy short for upcoming winemaking and didn’t have time to get another one fast enough. As usual, there was one partial bottle left at the end, which went [...]
A few more Limited Edition wine kits have come in. I posted previously about starting the Cellar Craft Chateau du Pays; I’m going to bulk age this wine for while, but I did do an extra racking about a month after stabilizing and clearing to take out the second addition of Hungarian oak cubes, so [...]
We finally opened the last bottle of our RJ Spagnols Limited Release Argentinian Trio white blend. This wine was bottled about 2 years ago now, and it was a good thing we were drinking the last bottle. We really loved this wine, in fact it won a silver medal and “Best of Class” at the [...]