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I think one of the appeals of a stainless steel vessel vs a flex tank is that I can get a variable volume tank, as far as I know flextanks don’t have that option, but maybe I’m wrong. I have the budget for SS, and for the volumes I’m looking at it seems like there’s only a couple hundred bucks...

I really wanted to find a ~30 gallon neutral oak barrel, but they seem to be difficult to come across. So now I'm thinking of going with a 30 gallon stainless steel. I won't get the nice texture you get from oak oxygenation but at least I can work at a quantity I think would be manageable. Has...

Yeah it’s less that it’s trouble and more that I just have no idea how you’re supposed to go about it all. Thanks, I’ll check out a wine grapes.com!

I actually used Cal Wine Broker last year for 100lbs of Cab Franc. I would use him again some time, just because there aren’t a lot of other options, but to be honest I had a couple issues. #1 is that he had a handful of varieties listed on his site as being “pesticide free”. I to do chose Cab...

If you have really great grapes you don’t need nutrients... but I think on the hobbyist scale that’s rare, sadly!

So I’m hoping to step things up a notch this year and get moving on a larger batch of wine. I’d like to get 1/2 ton, (or 1 ton if that’s not even possible) of good quality fresh grapes, but I’m not sure how to go about it. I live near wine country in California, I tried cold emailing a couple...

@bathman how did it turn out? Wanted to try this myself with a fruit wine I have fermenting.

I have a cab franc aging right now that’s missing some of the more bright flavors and is a bit pyrazine heavy. I was thinking about adding some acid blend to help it balance. Is it a bad idea to do this after fermentation? If not, how would I go about it - do I just add the acid powder in, or do...

Oh trust me, I'd love to have an oak barrel, and it's not the price point that's keeping me from getting one! I live in an apartment and have to store all my wine supplies under my desk - I simply don't have room to add a barrel on top of the equipment I already have! I'm hoping to move to a...

If only I had one...

Well damn. Thanks for the info. :)

Has anyone here tried doing micro-oxygenation in a glass carboy? I've heard you can set up a small aeration stone and do it with aquarium equipment. I have a cab franc that I think would greatly benefit from it.

It's been over a month since I splash racked though. It's just odd since my other wines will bubble for months. But I guess this one just degassed quickly. Thanks!

I have a cab franc that's been aging for a month and a half. So far I've only done gallon batches of fruit wine, this is in a three-gallon carboy. When I racked to the secondary vessel I was using a type of airlock I'm not familiar with, but then after racking changed it up to my usual S-type...

So I'd planned on making a sparkling pineapple wine in the champagne style, but recently realized that our tiny freezer (it's the kind where the freezer is just a drawer under the regular fridge) won't fit bottles upside down. So I can't really do the whole riddling and disgorging method usually...

I’m curious, are winegrapesdirect buckets whole grapes, or have they already been crushed?

My cab franc took four days for fermentation to start, and then about nine days to get to the point where I moved it to a secondary vessel. I’d check with your supplier on whether it had SO2 added prior to freezing, people are so quick to add SO2 these days that I imagine anything sold...

Cool read, interesting how two different groups came to two separate conclusions about how much of the yeast was from the vineyard vs the winery. Keep in mind your juice has probably been sulfited, and any indigenous yeast is probably dead. You may end up getting it kicking from ambient yeast...

Don’t worry, I racked this afternoon. My auto-siphon was broken so I had to visit the local brewing supplies shop, but it’s all good now. Had a half glass while racking, didn’t notice any off flavors yet! Definitely still a VERY young tasting wine though.

Doing my first batch of grape wine (Cab Franc), and ended up with a 3 gallon carboy of free run juice, and a half gallon carboy of pressed juice. There’s a lot more sediment/lees than I’ve ever had in the fruit wines I’ve done. Both the half gallon and the three gallon have about an inch and a...