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Good point. I am going to spray the ground as well.

Great advice. I probably should have sprayed earlier in the season. Fortunately I have a couple of other varietals so all is not lost. I was planning to replace my Tempranillo next year since it's not growing that well. The vines are vigorous but I lose a couple each year and some only push a...

Hi Everyone I am located in Southwest Idaho in the Sunnyslope region. I have 90 Tempranillo, 90 Chardonnay and 130 Cab Franc vines. The Chard and Tempranillo are 7 years old and the Cab Franc is 5 years old. This year I'm running into an extreme outbreak of Powdery Mildew. I seems really early...

After several months working on it off and on I was finally able to use my homemade air-blast sprayer today. It worked great. Should make spraying sulfur much easier. The main components are: commercial leaf blower, 3-point carry-all, Sprayer with 5 gpm pump and a 25-gallon tank.

I have noticed occasionally my stomach will be a little grumbly after drinking lees-laden wine so I've tried to minimize my tasting size. May not happen to everyone though.

Great idea to pitch what I have and order something else to add when it arrives. I really hate to add water! Victor

That was an option I considered but I'm harvesting on Saturday and don't have enough time to acquire a different yeast strain.

Going to be harvesting Tempranillo from my own vineyard for the first time. Brix is currently 25. Using this calculator, a brix of 25 has a potential ABV of 15.1% which is pretty high IMHO. I am using Wyeast 4028 yeast which has an ABV tolerance of 14%. My question is should I reduce the brix...

Our Syrah came out nice although it does not have the complexity I'd like to see due to not enough oak. We're not using barrels yet and need to dial in the amount of oak cubes. That's what I got for bottles this year so maybe I will just stick with that style.

I like the idea of uniformity. I discovered during bottling of last year's vintage that once you adjust the bottle filler you don't want to use different size bottles for the same batch. I used Antique Green bottles this year and I think they look nice. Gotta check out the final product...

Hi Everyone, Fairly new winemaker here in Caldwell ID. For our 2019 Syrah I bought new bottles from Amazon and they worked fine although a little pricey. As I start to think about this year's harvest I started wondering about where to source bottles since I'll be producing 30-40 cases this year...

Now's probably good time to buy Tesla at a low price.

Thanks for the feedback. My plan is to use my variable capacity tank to minimize headspace. I think what I will do is not add SO2 when the alcoholic fermentation is complete and inoculate with MLF bacteria at the beginning of EM. Hopefully MLF won't take too long and will add SO2 at that point...

Hi Everyone, I'm planning on experimenting with EM (extended maceration) on my Syrah this year. I've been reading articles on it and, as expected, there are varying opinions on how to approach it. My current plan is as follows: 1) Everything done in SS. 2) At the completion of alcoholic...

I was actually still planning to crush the grapes by running it through the crusher/destemmer but after the grapes had been sorted. I could also just destem and crush manually since everyone that has offered to help wants to stomp the grapes. So far I have been sticking to my rule that there...

Hi Everyone, I have an older Ares15 crusher/destemmer and was wondering if anyone has ever tried to remove/disable the "crusher" component so it can be used as a destemmer only. I'd like to sort my grapes before crush and it seems like it would be easier if they were separated from the stems...

Cover crop keeps weeds out (once established) and provides nitrogen and organic material to the soil. Our soil does not have much organic material. It also prevents erosion. Our soil is considered "loamy sand" so it's basically like a beach and therefore the dirt blows all over during the...

The cover crop is not directly under the vines. The row spacing is 8 feet. There is a 1-foot buffer on either side of the row so the cover crop is 6 feet wide in the middle between the rows.

Hi Everyone, I'm planning on planting a cover crop this year and I'm having a heck of a time trying to determine how to water it. I am using drip for my vines so overhead watering of everything doesn't make sense. I've looked into drip tape but I would need such an unbelievable amount of it to...

Sorry I was not more clear earlier. You can most certainly adjust both TA and Brix and indeed we did. What I meant was that if you choose to pick and a time when TA is optimal you can adjust Brix and when Brix is optimal you can adjust TA. I'm just trying to understand how you would choose to...