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Wouldn Does't this simply depend on whether or not you like oak taste in SB? I personally hate it but you may like it. When it comes to things like oak my philosophy is don't add it unless you have a good reason, because you can't take it back :)

I'm very tempted to get more fruit since so much is out there that's going to rot on the vine, but I have already taken in almost 2 tons of strays and it's getting into crazy territory for a home winemaker. My original plan was 800lbs and I'm now up to 3,800lbs...

Blauer Wildbacher: does this mean Blue Wild Badger like I think it does? :) I never did ML on any whites or rosés, because the fruitiness was important to me. Cool climate grapes have great varietal character and fruit, but most are not going to become the rich, soft California style wine...

I made Barbera rosé this year too. My grapes we processed a month ago, so the rose is clearing now. It looked too dark when I pressed it, but it looks like it's not far from a white wine now! Same thing with Malbec -it tasted a bit tannic and very dark for a rose after first racking but now it's...

What grape is the rosé made from? I made a great totally dry sparkling wine using the champagne method from Catawba juice at 12 g/l and it was a crowd pleaser. I took may years of aging, though. I dealt a lot with wine with over 10 g/l TA in the Finger Lakes -you can still make good wine! Have...

Hi CDrew, That's really sad, but not unexpected. Even the very well-known vineyards like Shake Ridge are having trouble selling their grapes, so it's not surprising smaller places are struggling. I'm definitely very happy with the grapes I got this year, but I'm at max capacity for now. Next...

That's great to hear -if you have any ideas you'd be open to sharing on sources for next year or want to go in on a larger amount of grapes just let me know. I'm very interested in some of the less common varietals, but this year I started late and got what I could (it was easier this year due...

Thanks, I have 6 carboys of juice (around 32 gallons) of Roussane (with probably 5% Grenache Blanc in there, if that). I'm going to go with GRE, D47 and QA23.

Hi all, Looking for some advice here, since I'm in relatively uncharted waters. The story: As I've posted elsewhere, I'm newly out in the Amador County foothills and finally get to make wine for the first time since moving to California 10 years ago. I networked with several local vineyards and...

D80 is an awesome strain for Tempranillo and will handle this kind of gravity -I used three different strains on my Tempranillo (which was 23 Brix so fairly different) and I really loved the character of the D80. D254 is good too for helping to enhance fruit but you have to feed is carefully or...

Are you planning on prefiltering with a coarser filter before the .35µ? Those guys can get gummed up shockingly fast if there's any kind of suspended material in the wine.

I've been doing a bunch of reading up on whole cluster fermentation since I wanted try it this year -I ended up not doing it mainly because I was overwhelmed enough with processing 3600 lbs of grapes in a few weeks that I was less experimental than I thought I would be. A couple take-aways I...

I'm living in Sutter Creek, CA. I just moved out here from San Jose. I am in the middle of Amador wine country so mostly dealing with grapes (this weekend was a lot of dealing with grapes -spend 4 hours picking Muscat Blanc on Saturday and all day today crushing and pressing it...) I was...

Welcome! I know that area well -I went to college in Loudonville and my uncle lived in Scotia for a while. Where'd you get your cider apples from and what varieties did you use? I grew up working on an apple orchard just over the border in Berkshire county so I'm fascinated by cider. The only...

I never tire of seeing a think mass of freshly crushed grapes with little obvious juice turn into well-separated cap and juice layer by the end of the week -it's like magic. It's amazing how different the grape cultivars are. Zinfandel and Malbec are juicy right from the start. On the other end...

I'm a bit late to this rodeo but I made a ton of deChaunac back when I lived in Ithaca, NY. At that time (the 90's) I found that Pasteur Red made the wine people judged best, but D254 didn't exist then and I didn't evaluate RC212. Too late in any case :) One word of warning -too much time on...

I have been thinking of trying this exact same thing -a half-way carbonic maceration with whole, uncrushed clusters on the bottom and covered with crushed/stemmed grapes to make it anaerobic. I was reading that a lot of wineries in southern France started using CM on grapes like Carignan and it...

Wanted to update folks on my 2020 season so far. I'm learning a lot about California grapes and being worried about dealing with low acid/high pH -never an issue in the Finger Lakes. All my grapes are done fermenting and have been pressed and moved to storage -a combination of carboys, 9 gallon...

Hi Donkey, You may want to try judicious filtering to see if that gets you to the elusive "commercial" taste. I had heard all sorts of propaganda about filtering removing all sorts of great stuff from wine, etc. so I was worried. I first used it on a sweet wine to help avoid refermentation. It...

Is it typical for Amador Barbera to be so expensive? I live in Amador and I always think of it as the grape that everyone grows (and often has some trouble selling). Malbec here is a much rarer commodity so I would have thought that would be the pricy one. That being said the Barbera from...