I saw a classified on the SDAWS site for local syrah grapes, and convinced Dave to go in on 500 lbs. Paul is also going to take 500 lbs to make at home. This syrah is grown at Live Oak Vineyard in Fallbrook, and we get to take part in harvest when the grapes are […]
Tag archive: home winemaking
I was racking off my Cellar Craft 5-week Old Vines Zinfandel kit today and noticed this yucky-looking white residue at the top of the wine, sticking to the side of the carboy as it was racked off. There was a lot of lees at the bottom, too. I have an extra liter or so of […]
Time to bottle the sauvignon blanc that had the battonage treatment. That added another 6 weeks of waiting to the kit, I’m very curious how this wine will compare to the “untreated” kit. I will let these bottles wait for about 3 months before doing a side-by-side, to give it as much of a fair […]
Our friend invited us over to “help” him bottle his 2 barrels of wine. We spent most of the time drinking barrel samples, the bottling went pretty quickly. We did have a problem at the end where the corks were coming back out of the bottles. I’m still not sure why this started happening, but […]
I finished bottling the “Bahia Belle” blend and Merlot B (“Embarcadero” merlot) today. Then I finally started another “easy drinker” red kit that I’ve been excited about, a Cellar Craft Lodi Old Zinfandel. I wanted a good, easy house zin to have around for grilling and whatnot, so I did a lot of research on […]
My goal was to fill all of these bottles today. It turned out I filled over half, but decided to wait to fill the rest next weekend. Why do today what you can do a week from now, eh? I did at least put together all of the blends. ‘Fiesta Islad Cab’ will be mainly […]
I had some friends over last night to taste the cabernet sauvignon and 3 merlots made from fresh grapes. We first by tasted each individually, starting with the cab and then the barrel merlot, merlot A, and merlot B. It was very interesting how much all of the wines have changed even since my last […]
I noticed that quite a bit of sediment fell out of the home merlots, so I decided it was time to rack them off again and test them for pH and acid levels. I also figured the Free SO2 levels had dropped (I give up on the test strips) and added ¼ tsp Kmeta to […]
The Yakima Synergy is clear enough that I’m not going to filter it for bottling. It came out great! I did leave about 700 mL at the bottom of the carboy that had some sediment and poured it off into a separate bottle to clear a little more. Tasting notes: Very faint nose of apricots […]
I’ve been wanting to try some battonage on a wine kit for a while, since I first read about the technique. Battonage basically involves leaving the wine on the fine lees for an extended period of time, and stirring the lees up every few days to extract additional amino acids and mannoproteins from the yeast. […]