The rewards and frustrations of home winemaking

This wine is now approaching 2 years, it’s hard to believe it made it that long, it’s so good! After time the honey/flowery notes have come forward, although there is still a good spicy bite in the finish too.  Still a great wine, it will be hard to let this one go.  I hope this […]

Although I *said* I would give the syrah a few more weeks to finish MLF, it really doesn’t seem realistic that it would get going if malic acid levels have not dropped at all after 4 weeks.  I might actually be risking something bad happening in the wine in the meantime.  I posted this problem […]

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 went out to help my friend Ray put posts in for his new vineyard at Highland Valley.  It was a great day, although we had Santa Ana winds.  That means nice warm, clear weather, and it also means strong gusts of wind up to 35 mph.  There were a few times we had to […]

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 our syrah never finished malolactic fermentation, and since the free SO2 is below 10 ppm, I decided to try to restart the MLF with some fresh bacteria.  I set up 200 mL of filtered water with some acti-ML nutrient and added 2 grams of dry “Bacchus” MLB.  While that was incubating, I rechecked the […]

There are only 2 bottles of this wine left, though it is surprising that it has lasted this long.  This wine has really developed nicely over the years. It now has very rounded, mellow nose of apricots and melon. Coconut notes develop on the tongue coupled with crisp flavors of lychee and apple. This wine […]

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, […]

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 […]