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Top wire high cordon (hanging down)... two trunks. Mostly marquette with some petite pearl. 42 vines total.

Has anyone tried replacing the ball with a pressure gauge, or (better yet) making their own with a one-way valve and pressure gauge?

Where are you all getting your juice buckets? I don't live near anywhere where I could pick up in-person, and all the ones I've found online either don't ship or shipping costs are prohibitive. I normally do kits... and the high-end ones... but I'd love to evolve my skills and be a bit more...

Argon + vacuum

Ok technically on a molecular level, sure. But don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. At the end of the day, more of the denser gas will be in contact with the wine than oxygen, reducing the rate of oxydation. In fact, I'd hypothesize that the O2-wine contact in a narrow space ("topped...

With the understanding that my equipment isn't pulling a perfect vacuum. ;) Add some argon first, then pull a vacuum (to some degree) using an AIO Wine Pump. So from what's left behind, presumably there's enough of it as argon to protect from whatever non-argon gas is also still remaining.

Extra wine... which is stored in another barrel? Which then now needs to be topped off with extra wine... from another barrel? :D Even if you're storing the majority in barrels but then your "extra" in glass carboys... anything you steal from will then itself need to be topped-off from...

Yeah I should get a fancier way to monitor vacuum but for now the snot-sucker balls on the headspace eliminators (from AIO) do a decent job. But that's also why I combine with argon... that way even if I lose some vacuum, there's a heavy-gas blanket still there.

Costco sells wine kits???? o_O

My kitchen has been cool lately so for my last batch I used a brew belt, digital thermostat and probe, and one of those insulated bubble bags from a meal kit service over the fermentation bucket and cinched on top with a large rubber band. Set it for 72'F.

Expensive, but am so glad I just went ahead and did it. Once you've absorbed and moved beyond the initial expense, it turns so many things that had been PITA chores into a breeze. In that vein, I need to order more headspace eliminators... used my last one last night.

I wish any of mine had aged long enough to be able to answer this. :(

So the vines I have I just planted last season. So from what I hear, we're about at the time to do the first dormant pruning. As a newbie, I confess I'm pretty paranoid about screwing this up. Growth varied from just a foot or to to several, but nothing quite made the top cordon wire so from...

I pull some CO2 via vacuum but learned right away that the bubbles never stop that first time. Since I also use argon now I don't worry about it. When I pull a vacuum later there are no bubbles, so the real solution to de-gassing is "time" (as is often mentioned on this forum by the experts...

I really like the romantic concept of making my wine in wooden barrels. But every time I study the science (sanitation), extra work and costs involved it really becomes hard to justify.

I have 7 batches going at various stages at this point. All but one are ones that would benefit from 1-2 years of aging. Impatience prompted me to get at least one "quick" kit going so that I could at least have something to drink sooner, even if I knew ahead of time it wasn't going to be as...

Topping up was initially the bane of my existence as a newbie wine kit maker. I tried finding similar commercial wines but I was adding so much I began to wonder just how much of the final product was the wine I actually made plus it was expensive and a hassle. I tried the glass marbles but that...

Ok so lots of love for the 10-gal "Brute" (is that plastic even food-grade????).... but like I said, I'm looking to switch to stainless steel. So the pending question: is 7-gallons a large enough capacity for a kit with skins?

And that basically hits upon the point/concern I was trying to make.

I'm concerned about the bits about change in juice quantity and figuring out what the new "top" brand is