It’s that time again for the San Diego County Fair Homemade Wine contest Awards! I submitted 3 wines this year: 2009 “Cabrillo Bridge” Petite Sirah, which won a silver medal (should have been a gold!), 2008 Winexpert Limited Edition Carmenere/Cabernet blend, which won a bronze medal, and 2011 Winexpert Symphony, which won a silver medal. […]
Tag archive: winexpert
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
My “Hotel Del Coronado” Winexpert 2008 limited release Brunello is coming up on 3 years post bottling now. My first reaction to drinking this wine was, WOW! It is definitely at its peak, and is exceptional. Big, bold aromas of blackberry, sage, and light spice. Perfectly integrated flavors of currant, blackberry, and raisins with cedar […]
I bottled both the Cellar Craft 2010 limited edition Marsanne-Viognier-Roussanne and the Winexpert Spanish Rose today, getting ready for summer sipping. The MVR wasn’t quite clear, which I think might be due to my use of marbles for topping up my wines. When wines with marbles are moved at all from their place of rest […]
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 […]
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 […]