The rewards and frustrations of home winemaking

I’m pretty sure the MLB is not viable anyway, but I don’t want to risk exploding wine bottles, either.  What we needed to do was treat our merlot with lysozyme.  Lysozyme is an enzyme that will lyse the bacterial walls, which definitely completely destroys any bacteria that might still be hanging around.  Chris Van Alyea […]

Time to bottle!  I racked about half of carboy, then filtered the rest with my gravity filter and combined the wine before bottling – I was too impatient to wait for it to clear over an extended bulk aging. I really need to get an inline filter for the enolmatic, the gravity filter added an […]

This is my first Cellar Craft kit.  I’m looking forward to this one for several reasons.  I’ve read a lot of good things about Cellar Craft on winepress.us.  Also, the description of this white blend sounds beyond yummy;  it’s a blend of Marsanne and Roussanne from Yakima valley in Washington state, two lovely rhone whites.  […]

I had the opportunity to help out Chris Van Alyea bottling his Christopher Cameron 2007 “Lambert Bridge Vineyard” Petite Sirah and 2006 Costa Azul Sonoma County Red Blend. We bottled about 360 cases total, it was a long day, but a lot of fun!  It was really interesting to check out the fancy bottling line, […]

The Argentinian Trio was a bit full after racking, so I took out about 550 mL before degassing.  I’m glad I did, there was a LOT of foam!  It was foamy for the first and second set of stirring, then I waited about half an hour an stirred again to try to really degas the […]

I finally joined San Diego Amateur Wine Society (SDAWS) and went to an actual meeting.  It was very interesting, I met a lot of home winemakers and several people also have small home vineyards (yep, totally jealous).  I decided to ask around for advice about my merlot-no-go MLF problem.  Everyone steered me to the same […]

Time for another reserve kit!  This one is also from RJ Spagnols, and is an unoaked blend of Viognier, Riesling, and Chardonnay.  The starting SG is at 1.10, so I should get a final alcohol of about 14%.  It smells yummy already, I can’t wait to sip this one over the summer!

Time to rack the Muller-thurgau and barolo.  Unfortunately, I got a little overzealous with the stirring of the elderflower tea bags in the MT, and punctured most of them.  Now there are cute little flowers floating all over the wine.  This became a problem as I was racking, the flowers were small enough to be […]

The instructions say to rack the Barolo when the SG reaches 1.040-1.050, and the SG today is 1.038.  I guess I didn’t expect it to go so fast, although after racking, it’s obviously still in vigorous fermentation.  The oak chips get added at this point, they can been seen floating in the foam at the […]

The burgundy is now about a year and a half old.  Nose of cherry with traces of herbs. No fizz in this bottle, did not decant or vacuum pump, just splash poured. Flavors of caramel, plums, and light cherry. Getting more of the “bacony” and “smoky” flavors just now. Taste definitely integrated better, quite drinkable […]