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You may want to purchase some food grade glass marbles, like these, to top help fill your carboy when you rack off the lees after fermentation is complete. You will lose wine some along the way, and you want to minimize headspace during aging. H

There is no hurry to add the acid as long as your pH is in a safe range such that spoilage is not likely. 3.4 should be safe, but make sure to measure it at the end of fermentation. You can acidify at that point if you want to get your pH down into the normal range for white wine. Note that both...

+1 to the document everything you do idea. Google sheets is a good way to do this. It gives you access to your wine log from a variety of devices. I am a big fan of the morewinemaking.com guides. Fairly throrough and you can read in sequence up to the point you are at, and then stop until you...

More advice Add 1/2 to 2/3's what the calculator says at first, let it sit for an hour, then re-measure brix/gravity with a sanitized hydrometer Run the calculator again on that result and your new volume of wine. If you are still at least a pound of sugar away, repeat with another half jump...

The general rule of thumb is that sugar levels can change 1 to 1.5 brix per week. How you sample the berries can cause a lot of variability in the reading. I try not to put too much faith in any one sugar test. I wait to harvest until I see a couple of samples that indicate it is time. After...

Can you expound on your process?. I have thought about doing this same thing, but usually find advice against it. I am curious about starting a high acid red with RC-212, and finishing it with 71B, the idea being that I would get the acid munching ability of 71B but the flavor profile of 212. I...

Before I adopted the freezing approach, I tried to cool my whites by putting the fermentation buckets in big plastic tubs filled with a few inches of water. I would add a bit of ice to the water and drape towels over the sides of the buckets that I kept moist. Not sure if I would call this...

I first adopted this strategy in 2017, so I guess the jury is still out. I struggled with fermentation temps in 2016. Two of my whites are harvested in early August when it is well above 70 degrees in my basement wine closet. I have bottled about half of my 2017 whites. So far so good. I am...

You might want to read this old thread . Burnt rubber smell usually indicates an H2S problem that was left untreated, which turned into a mercaptan problem.. Although in your case, the cycle seemed to move pretty quick. Excessive SO2 could stress the yeast, which might cause H2S problems. That...

I cope with this problem by not starting white wines until after Halloween. I freeze all of the juice I press during harvest. I thaw when the temperatures in my high tech wine making facility (ie the basement closet that my wife confines my winemaking to) are in the low to mid 60s. H

Where are you sourcing your juice from? Any chance that they have already made a sulfite addition? Maybe your addition is taking the SO2 levels too high for the yeast. What was the reading on the hydrometer at this point? Are you measuring your SO2 levels? I don't have a great answer for you...

Your pH is probably below 3 based on your sugar levels, but 2.0 is crazy low. Keep in mind that a meter intended for soil may be geared for measuring in the 4 to 9 pH range. Wine pH may be outside of its wheelhouse. For this year, you could probably get by with some wine litmus test strips like...

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I was researching this very topic while preparing for harvest this year. This article may shed some light https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/39a8/dd3eb30b570040e9c7701f860eb652079b03.pdf In their study, 71B and ICV-GRE each consumed malic acid (33% and 18%...

The WineMaker article on white wine skin contact seems to have moved. I believe the new link is https://winemakermag.com/technique/1282-white-wine-skin-contact

Iowa State lists Marquette as having a "semi-trailing" growth habit. You could train it to either system. Petite Pearl and Verona were too new to make their spreadsheet. My Petite Pearl has a growth habit similar to Marquette, but the vines are touch less vigorous. My verona is in year one, so...

Yeah. Last year it hit veraison on July 19 and I harvested on Sept 9. Netting is a must. H

3rd week of August in Iowa for for Frontenac. My initial focus is on varieties that I know I will harvest before Frontenac. TA is my primary harvest parameter for Frontenac, and I don't bother measuring that until I see the pH of my smaller samples come up. I measure brix at the same time to...

Control weeds. That is an important factor the first couple years. Irrigate if necessary. Note that we will soon reach a point where it is time to get those grow tubes so your canes can harden off. Do a bit of research on when the right time for that is in your area. H

That definitely looks like 2,4-D damage. The Iowa State viticulture specialist recommends not pruning off damaged tissue. He claims that it increases the metabolism of the herbicide. My edelweiss got hit pretty hard last year, but it still produced a large crop. I would have thinned it a bit...

If you were treating this transplant as a 2nd year vine, then you should be working to train one or two good trunks out of all that green vegetation. Looking at the pic though, I think the best course of action might be to leave it and let it be a bush for the rest of this year. I don't see...