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I had an "oaked" Vignoles in the Finger Lakes some years back, when "oaking" everything was all the rage. I felt it essentially ruined the wine and really didn't work. 1% acid or above is the norm with Vignoles, it's not exceptional. I've made completely dry Vignoles before, but it really...

When I was a kid in the 80's in Western Massachusetts before the interwebs provided such enormous resources on basically everything, we made hard cider just like this. People collected all the "drops" from the wild fruit growing everywhere -these were the descendants of domestic apple tress that...

If you compare this to the prices for hybrids and native grapes from the Finger Lakes (Wine Juice | 30+ Varieties | Fulkerson Winery & Farms) they are not too crazy ($5.50-8.00/gal). The viniferas are a lot more (≈$18-$20/gal), but the Finger Lakes is a very marginal area for vinifera, and these...

Maybe they can use mechanical harvesting for the buckets, but the grapes can only be hand harvested to ship? That could be a factor. -Aaron

This year (2020) I used D21 and GRE for Malbec. Still aging but I will do a comparison this weekend. For the most part I have been splitting my red batches between GRE, D80, D21 and D254 -generally just three yeasts per varietal. I then blend them together and age them together. For example, I...

I made DeChaunac with grapes from the Finger Lakes for years. I would say that it has a "typical" French-American Hybrid taste that isn't super on its own, and it generally works better in blends. I think it was planted more because it was easy to grow, rather than having any special wine...

I have "saved" wines like this with blending, if that's an option. Adding a small amount of an excessively fruity wine can turn something weedy and unripe into something palatable (hot tub wine). I have used catawba for this purpose and muscat -they are both a bit much on their own, but they can...

There are so many variables to consider with inter-specific hybrids. One is history -when many of these grapes were developed, the world was in a crisis that they needed to find a way out of because all of their grape crop was being destroyed by phylloxera. The major grapes and major pressures...

Hi DaveMcC, I'm from Adams, not far from Northampton -are you in Western Mass? One of my alternate futures (which could still happen, I guess) was to return to the land of my nativity and plant cold hardy grapes in Berkshire county. Sounds like you have a pretty cool vineyard! When I lived in...

With a good pH meter it's easy to test for TA, much easier than titration. I fill up a syringe with buffer solution and weigh it. I take 5 ml of wine and add 15 ml of distilled water. You just continuously monitor the pH of the solution until you reach pH of 8.2, when all the acid has been...

I second the Fulkerson's suggestion -got grapes from them for ten years. If you want a great rosé try the grape called "Rosette" -you can buy the pressed juice from them. I'm already pretty stoked about 2021. I just finished racking all the wines this weekend and won't touch them again until...

That's interesting what you say about the small amount of Muscat in the Viognier adding a lot. I was just planning out the potential white blends to try with the base wines that I have (Roussanne (31 gallons), Viognier (21 gallons) and Muscat (22 gallons)) and base Viognier with a bit of Muscat...

I'm making Malbec rosé and Barbera rosé this year and hoping to have them bottled in early 2020 -9 gallons of each. Interesting think -I was wine tasting in the local area this weekend and I got to talk to the wine maker at one of my favorites. He's bottling his whites and rosés in December...

This hilarious! When I was in Italy I noted to a home winemaker that you can't make your own home wines in France (at least not without going through a bunch of bureaucratic hurdles), and I wondered why it was legal in Italy (which of course also has a huge wine industry). He just said "Unlike...

Pinot is definitely in a class by itself, IMO, in being tough to work with. I made three from fresh grapes and two turned out poorly. I believe the first one may have been from a champagne clone -it had very little color and was very 'gamey' -it got blended with some other grapes. Next time I...

As my 90 year old Polish immigrant neighbor used to say: "It all goes to the same place!"

The only place that I've ever seen "oaked" SB is California, and it's less common than it used to be. Anything from New Zealand or France will not be oaky, so that's a safe bet, but won't taste much like California SB, which is less intense than either. If I remember correctly, things labelled...

If I remember correctly they found that in 'wild yeast" fermentations the dominant strain ended up being Montrachet, which had established itself over much of California's wine country. I'm pretty sure something similar happened in the Finger Lakes. One year early on I had put in a juice and...

Funny story -I was inspired by the family blend (the "<unprintable ethnic slur> red") that AJ makes with red grapes and muscat so I decided to try the same type of blend since I have so many darn grapes this year. My Zinfandel was picked in early September and already done fermenting when I...

Strange thing I wanted to ask about. I tested TA and pH right after crush, drawing juice from all four fermenters. It was 3.5 pH and .68% TA. I pressed and settled and racked the clear juice. pH went to 3.7 and TA to .57%. What happened here? Is this typical? I used Lalvin EX on the must after...