Pressing Day for ZIN – Bears Press Niners

Its been a little over a week and today the must is at 4 Brix.  I rented the  press from Fermentation Solutions for $30 bucks and pressed must into the Carboy.   This year’s yield looks like about 30 gallons and it actually tastes pretty Zinny.    I might have accidentally made a pretty good…

Syns Crush Zins, Ducks Crush Spartans…

The 2014 “Synfandel” is in the history books.  Gina and I picked grapes early this morning. Preliminary BRIX ratings averaged 25 so we decided to pick the best of the grapes aiming at a yield of 20 gallons.   In a couple of hours,  we ended up with about 200 lbs of grapes with at least…

Tomorrow is Crush Day and Ducks vs Michigan

Today I picked up the necessary ingredients from Fermentation Solutions for this years Zinfandel. Tomorrow is the 2014 harvest of the Vineyard Grapes and I am reviewing our protocols for this year. Hopeful this will serve to remind me what the process consists of in future harvests. I tend to forget. Day One – Harvest…

Another Brix in the Fall…

It’s Grape harvesting season again and I’ve started to measure the BRIX of our crop on a daily basis now.  The day you pick determines the quality of wine.  The usual timetable for our vineyard is sometime between now and November.  Typically its been mid September but many of the vinyards in Napa Valley are already…

Summer Maintenance

The grape canopy is getting a bit wild. Time to give them a trim. I removed some of the suckers and leaves to help the grapes ripen well, i culled and pruned some of the grape bunches. Removing some of the bottoms of the clusters makes the grapes bigger which is desirable especially for the…

The Grapes of 2014

This years drought seems to have invigorated the grapes in the vineyard.  The vines have exploded with growth this month and it looks like its going to be great year.  Even the roses are collapsing from the weight of roses.  This weekend we will start thinning out the vines to see if we can force…

The Grapes are starting to move….

I cant remember the grapes starting to get leaves this early in the season.  The wierd weather must be confusing them. With California in the grips of severe drought and with the Santa Clara Valley Water Nazis demanding a 20% reduction in use or sanctions,  It looks bad for wine and good for raisins.  On…

Napa is harvesting grapes already….

I read today in the paper that the grapes in Napa are being harvested a week earlier than last year.   Its time to start measuring the BRIX on the grapes. Meanwhile its also time to start finishing the port from last year.   Here is the recipe I will be using. FORTIFYING WINE To…

The grapes live again…

I was a bit worried at pruning time that these sticks had seen better days,  but there are signs of life in the Zins.  The table grapes are already rapidly growing.  There was very little water this spring but I think that wont mean much.  The Roses around the grapes are doing well in the…

The vines are pruned…

After reading and researching, I’ve decided I would prune our grapes in the Double Guyot and Cordon Pruning system. The system is essentially a spur trained version of the Guyot system that involves using single or bilateral cordons instead of canes. In double Guyot, two spurs and two canes are retained.The choice between single and double Guyot is decided…

Lactic acid has left the building…

Today racked our  20 gallons of wine.  Racking involves siphoning the wine from the sediment.  It  is essential to the  clarification of the wine and helps inhibit the production of unwanted off-flavors.    Chromatography shows that our malolactic acid fermentation is complete and we have no more lactic acid  in the wine.  We added american oak…

Pressing Day

The must hit the magic sugar level of 4 brix today and I headed over to Fermentation Solutions and rented a 10 gallon press.   Instead of buying a bunch of glass carboys for our 15 gallons of wine,   I decided to by a 25 gallon Stainless Steel Carboy so that next year when…

Yeast in the MUST

After talking to Eric at Fermentation Solutions in Campbell, we realized that we kind of “lost it” with the sugar addition–his words. He told us to call him next time we are about to make a dumb mistake. I took my new Refractometer over to the vinyard and started testing some grapes and a random…

Adventures in Winemakeing – Our first Zin harvest

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer Its hard to believe it been three years since we planted those bear root vines. Today we harvested our grapes to make our first batch of wine. We ended up with about 100 lbs of grapes, De-stemmed them by hand and we now have about 12 gallons of MUST…

The Vineyard

I can’t believe how the sticks (bareroots) that we planted only months ago are now all green and leafy.   Hopefully I can document the progress of our grapes in Flickr.   Our vineyard consists of 50 Zinfindale Plants and 10 seedless table grape varieties–Concord, Perlette, Thompson. and Ruby.  At the ends of the Trellis’…