Steve Wargo

Began my winemaking journey in the spring of 2019 buying of grocery store juice, or fruits. I made a few mistakes and learned a few do's and don't's during the fermentation experiments I conducted. I call them experiments because even though I had the basic winemaking process under my belt and could have stuck with it, there were things I was trying to do differently. At least that's what I thought. For example; natural yeast nutrients, using plant-based food items or plant juices high in nitrogen., heating up/boiling older bakers yeast used as a food for the fermentation. Some of those experiments turned out very tasty and I bottled and drank. Some experiments went down the drain.

In the Fall of 2019, I moved up to 6-gallon batches of vinifera juice buckets. This fall 2020 I hand-picked in the vineyard about 300lb of hybrid grapes (Marquette and Petite Pearl), and then crushed, fermented, and pressed some mighty fine wine. Out of that 300lbs, I destemmed 70lbs by hand and crushed just the berries no stems as a separate batch

Since the late 1980s, I brewed lager beer during the winter months using malt extracts/grain. So I had fermentation experience and gained techniques making beer that helped me ease into beginning my winemaking journey

If I have an idea, I research it and usually find a winery, or lab, or forum member conducting similar experiments, and sometimes they have published data that helps to guide me during my own experiment.

To find new information, I read beer, distilling, and winemaking forums, blogs, research papers, and watch YouTube videos.

So far I've fermented a total of 32 different small batches of wine using several types of S. cerevisiae yeast, and techniques.